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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.

All Thats Left
All That's Left of Some Poor Soul's Past

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.

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