At some point in your blogging career someone will do something that will make you angry. You may be asked to explain why you think Macs are better than PCs by someone who is simply looking to start a pro Windows argument, you may find that people insist on referring to you as Miss or Mrs. when you are clearly a man, a man with a reasonably stubbly photograph on his about page, or you may just get fed up of all the hate email you receive after posting perfectly valid income reports that the vast majority of your readers enjoy.

Or, you might simply be challenged by someone who disagrees with your position and wants an answer to a question that you find difficult.

In any event, you have to keep your cool. When you get angry you risk losing control, and when you lose control, amongst other things, you make yourself look stupid.

What follows isn’t meant to be a replacement for the very informative and useful Anger Management For Dummies, a book which my best friend and fellow Enormous Horn bought me for Christmas, partly as a joke but partly because I sometimes find myself getting a little hot under the collar when rehearsals don’t progress as smoothly as I would like them to. It is simply intended to be a quick guide to keeping cool when you find yourself approaching the keyboard and using your blog as a way to vent your rage.

Let’s imagine that someone has written something that your strongly disagree with. You have, and I’m simplifying things greatly here, three main options. You can choose to ignore them, respond to them intelligently and constructively, or lash out at them with insults and aggression.

It should seem obvious to most people that the second option is probably the best one, followed by the first if you feel option two isn’t possible. Option three, in the incredibly public world of the internet, is the quickest way to show that you have lost control. It is the way that causes the most damage not to the person your are trying to attack but to yourself.

If you absolutely have to let off steam and feel you have no other option than to confront the person then do it privately via email.

Here’s an example of how things can quickly go wrong.

A blog post I wrote three days ago divided opinion. The majority of commentators agreed with me in my assertion that it wasn’t possible to enforce a license that restricted further development and distribution of a WordPress theme since all WordPress themes are rooted in open source code. In order to make my point I developed a theme using Chris Pearson’s Thesis theme as a base and suggested that I would release it for free unless someone could convince me otherwise. My new theme looks nothing like Thesis and a lot of the code has been changed whilst retaining some of it’s best features.

Surely, isn’t that what WordPress theme development is all about? Learning from existing code, modifying it and then releasing it back into the community for free?

I was expecting an argument. I was not expecting to be called names and have insults hurled at me. Frankly, I expected better from the people who chose this form of reply.

Don’t lose your cool and don’t let your anger turn into rage fueled online outbursts. Always try to keep a level head and remain as professional as possible or your reputation, and ultimately your traffic, will suffer.