It’s a pretty interesting coincidence that on the same day I dispensed my one and only bit of blogging wisdom (Always, always, always be aware of your audience) that through no fault of hers, my wife was inadvertantly caught in the crossfire of some pretty petty passive-aggressive behavior of a reader who used her blog to find someone else and engage in some pretty weak behavior on my wife’s friend’s blog.

The most important rule of blogging is still: Be careful what you post because you never know who just might be reading it.

When I started writing posts about my past dating life, I knew it would be a challenge and a challenge is what I wanted, so I took it head on. It’s easy to write about the ups, but the downs are far more challenging. Reviewing my original post, my original goal was to a.) let people who have only met me recently learn a little about me and b.) encourage those discouraged about dating by telling a story that eventually led to my happy marriage. The tricky part is that many of the posts, by neccessity, involve discussing other people. It’s far too easy to air dirty laundry and take petty swipes at someone when you’re in control of a website, but real character happens when you can examine a stormy conflict and find the lessons you learned and the parts of your life you can improve instead of doling out blame to other people. I’ve got nothing to say bad about the people in my past, regardless of whatever disputes we might have had. I’d like to think that I only chose girls of high quality and character, otherwise I would’ve never dated them in the first place!

But nonetheless, rule number one of blogging is: Always, always, always be aware of your audience. You never know who might be reading. I’ll also add corollary #1 to the rule: No matter how much you password protect it, if you allow anyone to read what you have to say about someone, they will eventually find out what you said. The only question is whether it will take days, weeks, months, or years. Let the writer beware.