Buddhist Blogging
Darren Rowse over at ProBlogger Blog Tips has some good advice about what to do when your blog is attacked. I’ve been lucky to have pretty easy going blog readers and not any trouble for the last few years, but things got a little out of control last week. One thing he suggests is to establish boundaries. A part of this is to consider “the type of things that you’ll allow in the interactive areas of your blog.” Before I used to let anything go, but one day last week I was forced to reconsider and change this philosophy. Another suggestion is don’t get personal. I agree that “getting personal achieves nothing but escalating a conflict and perhaps even creating a lifelong enemy. It takes the focus away from the actual disagreement and further away from any productive resolution.” The article is filled with great advice including take it private and keep perspective.
He also put up an article about what a Buddhist monk taught him about blogging.
“If your house is on fire, the most urgent thing to do is to go back and try to put out the fire, not to run after the person you believe to be the arsonist. If you run after the person you suspect has burned your house, your house will burn down while you are chasing him or her. That is not wise. You must go back and put the fire out. So when you are angry, if you continue to interact with or argue with the other person, if you try to punish her, you are acting exactly like someone who runs after the arsonist while everything goes up in flames.”
Anyway, I’m a believer that it’s better to do something good in return to someone you feel has wronged you, instead of getting revenge. Don’t accept it, and let them know that you feel it is wrong, but don’t be angry. Otherwise hate and revenge can spiral out of control and get pretty bad.
Anyway, I’ve decided to add the wallstrip widget to my sidebar as a gesture of goodwill. In all honesty, I hope it brings them many viewers and much success.
I want to make it clear that I am not doing this in order to “one up” them and show everyone how righteous I am or to make them look bad. This is really just about me - I was upset and I’m trying to resolve it in this way. I’d like to be a better person and take the opportunity of something like this to try to “experiment with truth.” Besides, I’m putting it way down at the bottom of the left sidebar - hardly a high click-through area of the page.
Second, I am not doing this out of wussiness. No one is bullying me into this and I still have the same opinions and views of wallstrip that I stated in the previous posts. I need nothing from wallstrip, and I feel like I said nothing that was unfair.
