Pages

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Understanding the email address that is shown in your blog

This article explains what email address(es) are shown when someone is reading your blog - and why you don't have to worry if you see your own address even if you didn't ass it..


Many people who are new to Blogger get upset because when they look at their blog, they see their email address near the top right hand corner. 

Reasonably enough, they assume that is they can see it, so can other people.   And so they start looking for instructions about how to remove the email address from their blog.   Or they notice that some other blogs don't have email addresses showing, and start looking for ways to make their blog the same, sometimes with far-reaching consequences.

However there's one important piece of information that they've missed:

The email address that may be shown near the top right hand corner of a blog belongs to the person who is reading the blog, not the person who wrote it.
This means that it's simple to remove the email address from the top of your blog:  just click the Sign-out link.



Details:


Some blogs never show any email addresses, because they have hidden the navBar.   This is either deliberate, or because the are using 3rd party templates that simply don't include it.



But when you are viewing a blog (yours or someone else's) that is showing a navbar, and you are logged into a Google account, then your email address is shown near the top right hand corner of the screen.




In this example, I'm viewing someone else's blog, and my email address is shown (even thought it's quite hard to see because the background picture is noisy and the navBar has been set to be transparent).

In the same way, if one of your readers is looking at your blog, and they are logged in to a Google account, then their own address shows near the top right hand side of the screen.


My email address?


There is one small point that I've glossed over here.

When an "email address" is shown in the navBar, it's actually the name of the Google account that is currently signed in.  For many people, this is the same as their own email address, but some people have different email addresses.   And some now sign-in to Google with old "addresses" that have long-since stopped working for email:  this is fine provided they remember their password, and have updated the primary address that is updated with their account so that Google know where to find them.



Related Articles:


How to show an email address in your blog.

Understanding Google Accounts

1 comment: