Blogging Mishap & a Lesson Learned

My friend Nacole loves stamping, scrapbooking, card making.... in short, crafty things. Last week, she decided to start a new blog to showcase some of her handmade greeting cards and stationary. I've received many of her cards over the last couple of years, so trust me when I say they're super cute. Anyway, last week she was very excited about uploading pictures to her newly created page. I had called her on my way home from work one to chat about some things and ended up talking to her for much longer than expected, so I was a little surprised when I got another phone call from her not long after we hung up.

me: Hello?
Nacole: I just did something really dumb you're going to laugh at.
me: Really? What?
Nacole: Are you near your computer? Go to your blog.
me: Erm, OK.{brief pause while I navigated to the site}
Nacole: Um, I think that you were still logged into Picasa on my laptop...so um...I think I ended up uploading my pictures to your web album....
me: Oh, OK.
Nacole: ....and I just posted something on your blog. {It was then that I reached my blog and burst out laughing!}

There it was. A blog post definitely not "created by heidi." I told Nacole I thought it was so funny I just had to to save the screen shot...and blog about it, of course! She explained that she had been so confused by what happened, but in a few minutes we had it sorted out. I deleted her pictures from my Picasa web album (apparently it had kept me logged in when I had uploaded some things while on vacation), deleted her blog post, and together we logged me out of everything.

Or so we thought. Since Blogger, GMail, and Picasa are all Google family members, it seemed that being logged into one account technically kept me logged into another. I knew this, but usually it worked the same way for logging out- you log out of one, you log out of all. Not on Nacole's laptop. For some reason it just kept me logged in until finally she cleared her cache and I changed my password. Whew. She finally got her pictures uploaded to her own Picasa account and blog. She's had no problems since!

The moral of the story is this: make sure that when you check email, blog accounts, whatever, from someone's computer, the "Remember me" or "Keep me logged in" box is NOT checked. Make sure to always log out. And if the person is OK with it, you may want to clear out their cache or cookies. {Always a good idea on a public computer!}

I'm just glad it was my good friend who had access to my pictures, blog account, and email account!!