This weekend an interesting thing happened. I realized that my daughter would soon be old enough that she would one day soon want to hop online and browse the web. This realization has already started to come to fruition as my daughter is spending about a half hour a weekend playing around on the Barbie website.
Not wanting my little girl to accidentally run across something inappropriate I started researching ways to lock down our web browser. While my router comes equipped with the ability to blacklist any site my heart desires, doing so would be like punishing my fiancée and myself as the only way to turn that off would be to log into the router, change the settings and then change them back when we were done doing whatever we were doing. That whole process just seems cumbersome and annoying so I decided that I wanted something else that was less restricting to the adults in the household.
Today after browsing around LifeHacker, I stumbled upon Glubble. Glubble is a Firefox extension that allows you to whitelist which sites your Little Mr. and Misses are allowed to visit. This is all accomplished by a pretty nifty login system which requires the parent to set up two different accounts - one for the child and one for the parent. When your little one tries to view a site that is not an allowed site, the browser takes note of this and asks the parent/administrator if they would like to whitelist this site the next time that parent logs on to the browser.
As an extra bonus, when your little tyke logs on to their browser profile, they are greeted with a super friendly childlike browser skin to make the experience even more fun and kid friendly.
All in all, I dig it and I highly suggest any parent with younger children go check it out!
Download: Glubble
Source: LifeHacker
Jun 22, 06:10 AM
Sounds like an interesting solution. I’m not sure it’s the best for me. But I like the idea of whitelisting sites.
My daughter loves playing on the computer and she will surf sites for hours. She knows all the different kids sites and she can even type them in or find them in her favourites. What a smartie. :) We’ve just created a local profile for her on the computer, so she logins in under her own account and that way she has her own wallpaper and bookmarks. It would be cool if there was a way to implement a whitelist off the computer. So you could say this IP can only access these sites. While other IPs can access different sites.