Keeping little eyes away from inappropriate material

People can take just about any good thing and find a bad way to use it—the telephone, the automobile, prescription medicines. The list could go on and on, and the Internet is a candidate for that list. This post addresses the potential for someone reaching inappropriate material through a blog.

Sure, I realize that anyone sitting unsupervised at a computer and looking for inappropriate material will find it quickly without ever visiting my blog. I do, however, want to remove the possibility that by visiting my blog and clicking on link, a youngster could be seeing something he or she has no business seeing.

By far my biggest concern is the link at the top of Blogger blogs that says “Next Blog.” At first glance, it looks like a good feature. You can visit blog after blog you never knew existed, and you can find some real treasures. You can also find some real trash. You could be one click away from a blog featuring pornography, profanity, or hate speech.

You will notice this "Next Blog" option does not exist on this blog, or any of the other blogs I have composed (TalladegaCitySchools.blogspot.com, TeachTalladega.blogspot.com, or AlabamaArts.blogspot.com) One simple measure prevents someone reading your blog and being a couple of mouse clicks away from trouble.

I wrote about this same topic in November of 2005. Since that time, Blogger has gone through an upgrade. The instructions that worked before no longer work now. What follows is a set of directions which will work. Thanks to Rakesh for providing directions which will work with the new Blogger.

Removing the Navigation Bar

1. You will probably want to print this page of my blog to reference during the process.
2. To remove the Navigation Bar, you are actually going to edit the html code just a bit.
3. Go to www.blogger.com and log into your blog.
4. On the dashboard, click "Settings."
5. Click the "Template" tab
6. Click the "Edit html" tab
7. Find the line of code that consists of the word "head" surrounded by the < > . It will be near the top.
8. Click the mouse to insert the cursor at the end of the line. Hit "Enter" to give yourself a blank line.
9. Highlight and copy the following text. Paste this text starting in that blank line:


!-- code to add --
style type="text/css"
#navbar-iframe
{
height:0px;
visibility:hidden;
display:none;
}
/style

You are going to enclose 3 of the lines you just added with "< >" signs (leaving off the quotation marks). You will add these "< >" signs to enclose the first, second, and last lines of code you pasted. These three lines are the ones that said "!-- code to add --," "style type="text/css"" and "/style"

Once you have done this, click "Save Template." You can now click on "View Blog." If you have done it correctly, the navigation bar will be gone.

That’s it! I doubt the folks at Blogger would be happy about my doing this and even less happy about telling you about it. I am more concerned about being an accomplice to youngsters seeing stuff they shouldn’t than I am keeping folks happy.