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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 label is facetious. This arrived in my email today:

I had a good chuckle off of this.

I'll admit I'm interested in an infographic on all of the ways internet marketing has ruined the internet. Shop that to me, and I might bite.

Strike two, and you're out. At least on social media.

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 Twitter, too, which is why I walked away from it.

Perhaps more Christians should take a similar walk, unless you're really gifted at ignoring the arguments and seriously able to live by Titus 3:9-11.

"But avoid foolish controversies, genealogies, dissensions, and quarrels about the law, for they are unprofitable and worthless. As for a person who stirs up division, after warning him once and then twice, have nothing more to do with him, knowing that such a person is warped and sinful; he is self-condemned."

I mean, look at that passage. Twice. That's the cutoff point for engaging with pointless and divisive arguments. Twitter don't do twice, folks. Wow, did I despise who I was on Twitter. Facebook too, for that matter.

I'm not sure where the line is on how to use a gift of words and writing (and access to a blog) in a way that God wants, but I'm pretty sure, for me, it isn't on Twitter. Each Christian has to be really sensitive to the Holy Spirit in what we are and are not to read; it won't be the same for each person. But at least there are some good guidelines on how to respond on social media: two strikes. In a culture of perpetual "engage with me, are you chicken, now you blocked me, must mean your scared of my great intellect", that can be hard to do. But it's pretty good guidance.

Back where it all started, on Blogger.

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, remembering my old website, I thought: why not use Blogger again?

I'd already thrown off the concerns of online marketing and slavish devotion to traffic and "responsible" blogging that was mainly used to bring people to a website through search engines so I could sell. I don't care too much about that. So why not Blogger again? I'd stopped because it wasn't going to be a "real" part of my website, but I now no longer cared about that.

And so here you go.