Unspun™

One of the sad things about living in a digital world is that, more so than the fleshy parts of ancient dinosaurs, some parts of the past are lost, never to be recovered.

In approximately 1993 or 1994 — digital archeologists will just have to take my word for it — I created the first of many websites. I don’t remember the exact URL for the site: it might have been something like http://www.cybergate.com/~rickh since the now-defunct Cybergate ISP was how I gained (SLIP!) access to the commercial Internet. Eventually, I moved to ValleyNet Communications (later to become Protosource Network after I became the Vice-President there) and bought the domain name “Winkola.com.” (This is derived from a nickname (“Winky”) given to me by Sarah Serafimidis. That’s a story for a whole ‘nuther post.)

Back then, if we wanted to build blogs, we had to code our way uphill, through the snow,both ways!  And that’s just what I did for quite a long time.  Winkola.com constantly morphed as I posted information about things that interested me, images from local plays — not part of any failed Hollywood career as one Holocaust denier has mistakenly claimed all these years (do these guys ever get anything right?) — and I slogged my way through several versions of HTML code to eventually add an “events calendar” complete with links to the “events pages.”  Ah…for the days when the <table> tag was brand-new and we were all trying to figure out how to make it do things it wasn’t (then) designed to do!

Though by then I was part of a small group creating applications with perl, it never occurred to me to create blogging software.  This was not the first — or last! — time that I missed my opportunity to be involved in something significant.  I still ruefully remember sitting around with friends, laughing at the guy who bought chairs.com, or some other generically-named domain, which seemed to us quite silly at the time.  (I even laughed about the idea of buying rick.com.  I did not.  Today, that domain is worth a lot of money, too.) Consequently, as with my dinosaur-friend above, all the fleshy-parts of my proto-blogging pages are lost.

But I digress.  Repeatedly.  And this was supposed to be a “blurb.”

Eventually someone with more business sense than me created blogging software.  I won’t bore you (even more) with all the packages I tried before settling for several years on MovableType™.

With the birth of my first MovableType™ blog, Unspun™ took the place of Winkola.com.  (Winkola.com still exists, but is merely a referrer — or “referer” as the “correct” (mis)spelling of that word has evolved in HTMLspeak — to Unspun™.)  From at least 2003 through 2008, it powered blogs I wrote at Unspun™ and TechStop™.

In either late 2007, or early 2008, I started learning about WordPress™.

The one language I had not dealt with a great deal, PHP, powers WordPress™ and that delayed my getting to know it. In a word — okay, three words — I love WordPress™. Tinkering with WordPress™ lead me back to something I’ve always loved: building websites. In mid-December 2008, I decided to create a “mother-of-all-Rick’s-websites” here at RickHorowitz.com, using WordPress™. The theme I selected and am busily modifying is Revolution Office from Brian Gardner Media, LLC & Circa75 Media, LLC.

Since the development of RickHorowitz.com, Unspun™ will now focus more on political and social commentary, while a new blog will be built — sledding downhill with WordPress™ the entire way! — at RickHorowitz.com for more general, and/or more personal, posts.

You now know more about Unspun™, and a few other things, than anyone either needs or cares to know. To get some firsthand experience with Unspun™, click one of the many instances of its name in this post.

Tags: blog, blog history, blogging, politics, social issues, unspun™