Your Blog Access Rights

Now you will need to decide who you will allow to read, post, comment, etc. on your blog.  Many of the software tools we are going to cover have a lot of options on who can access your site, so having this information thought out will help our setup process.  Why do this before you have loaded anything?  Because once you load the program or sign up for a site you will be in editing the setting right off and you may as well edit things while you are in there.  Also, this gives you plenty of time to think about who you would want to have access.

Obviously for your personal blog you would prefer only friends and family would be able to post comments and not spammers or some creepy dude that you don’t know.  Cause based and niche business type blogs will also have their own needs in this regard.  As you start getting feedback you may also want to change your settings (IE you might get a lot of spam comments, in which case you can institute the weird letter verification system, or moderating each comment before they get posted, etc.)  Each layer of verification of course is going to have its draw backs.  There are tools to allow only registered users read your posts, but normally they have to log in to show they are registered.  Does Grandma really need to remember her log in each time she wants to see what you are up to?

These are just things to keep in mind before picking one of the tools and starting a blog.  We will get into access rights each time we cover a different tool.

This might be clear as mud for some of you, but hopefully when we get into the specific tools it will click.  Are there any general overall questions on access rights?

Ben