Julie R. Neidlinger

I really ought to write a Curmudgeon Guide about what to expect when you're commenting online. More than a few blog posts I've written have been about persnickety and humorous online disagreement, and I always find it fascinating how you can predict the responses. You'll find some sort of parry-riposte involving these phases:
Grammar police/semanticsAttack the messengerDiscredit the messengerDox the messengerEtc. Yada Blah MehYou're an emotional femaleYou stupid b***h if I ever met you in person I'd ______. That's a basic summary. Anyway, a recent post of local interest created some dustups online, and I found the responses intriguing.

These are the particulars for this instance, but they tend to follow the usual patterns of response.

"What's your vested interest?"
When you get asked that question late in the conversation game after several verbal hands have been laid out on the table by a fairly certain fake Facebook account, you can rest assured …

My collection of books warning about the dangers of the internet grows. From Lanier to Stoll to Carr and more, I'm a choir being preached to.

Some random rules and guidelines I've assembled and mostly sorta tried to follow:
Dump Twitter. I left Twitter in January, because it's a sewer full stop. Get out now, while you can, before the turds hit you in the face. It inspires the worst behavior, both in response and in thinking you should opine on everything. There is no better place for a witty retort to be misconstrued and cost you your job or whatever else.Reduce Facebook. If you can dump Facebook, great. If you're like me and have to have an account for work page management and to connect with family, reduce use. No Facebook on my mobile devices. I only check it at my desktop.Time Limit Entanglements. Embroil yourself in an online battle for no more than one day only. Let's be honest: no one is changing anyone's mind. The internet is where we dig trenches and lo…

This is a day and age where everyone thinks having a strong emotion/opinion is justification for sharing. They think the First Amendment is somehow a guarantee that they get to share their opinion with anyone and that it must be given "due respect."

Due respect, indeed.

You may have the right to free speech, but I am not obligated to listen nor care.

There are only a few times I'm interested in someone's opinion. If you're an expert and you know what you're talking about and have solid information to share that you believe would be of helpful interest, OK. Or, if I came to you because you are an expert and you know what you're talking about and have solid information to share that I believe would be of help, OK. If you're a close friend or family member and you actually have some skin in the game of my life and care, OK.

But the shotgun approach to receiving unsolicited opinions from random strangers is of zero interest and curiosity, of zero value.

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Internet marketing is awful.

I worked in that world for several years; I know the tricks. Just thinking about how much I could tell you about what really goes on behind all of the Shiny Happy Marketing People is absolutely wearying. It's enough for a book.

One technique to garner traffic is to create some generic piece of content, and then email all over tarnation to see if someone will use it on their website. There are a variety of ways marketers find and choose their email targets, some more thoughtful than others. Regardless, this is one of many reasons why you see what seems to be the same content everywhere on the internet.

I actually save those emails that I receive (and I get a fair number, since my name is on a lot of marketing blog posts from back in the day and people think I am interested) labeled as "great email examples", because some are so badly done I can't keep myself from going back and cherishing them. Clearly, the word "great" in the la…

My blog readers from years past know of my foray into the world of TheoBlogging. It got pretty ugly. Knowing how awful it got only makes how bad it is now all that much more impressive (in a negative way).

I'd started this blog post a while back, and had tossed a link in it to a Facebook post. I can't see that post now, so I don't know if it exists and I'm blocked, or what. I don't remember what it was about, or why I saw fit to start a bare draft and include that. Clearly, something explosive was said. The original title of this post was "A faith blogger goes ballistic on social media" and that sure sounds click-worthy.

A couple of random statements, then.

First, there have been few things as disappointing as reading the social media accounts of the Christian authors (and even bloggers). There are books I own that were a real blessing, only to discover the author is a bit of an ass on Twitter. Super disappointing.

Let's be honest. I was an ass on Twi…

When I first started blogging, I wrote each page by hand in HTML. I uploaded it via FTP to my website. That was back in 1999.

Then I discovered Blogger, a blogging platform. This was before Google bought it. I began using that to blog, writing my posts online (a novel idea back then) and sending them via FTP to my website. It was a very handy service.

Google bought Blogger. Things changed. I sensed the ability to blog in the cloud and send it to my static HTML site was going away, so I moved to WordPress in 2008. Blogger did, indeed, end that option shortly after.

In 2014, I left the behemoth that WordPress was, a messy database of my writing that was almost impossible to backup on my own computer and gain easy control of.

I tried Medium. I tried Facebook notes. I did a lot of writing in Google Docs and made them publicly available. But mostly, I all but stopped blogging.

Yet back in my old Blogger account lurked thousands of posts from years ago. As I was looking through them, rememb…