“I’m not a shill, I’m a human being!” or History of an Unread Blog

A reader on Boing Boing going by the name of loraksus accused me of being an EA shill for the post on Spore’s DRM.  While I admire the diligence in rooting out potential shills, I can’t let the accusation pass.

Part of the ‘evidence’ was how recently the first post on this blog was made.  It suggested to loraksus that the whole thing is could be a hastily erected viral ad for Spore, set up to push the insidious argument that perhaps we should oppose DRM by making arguments rather than merely proclaiming turpitude (surely the slippery slope to actually supporting DRM).

For the record, although I’ve been blogging since 2006, I moved from my own crap, handmade blog to a more organised affair using Apple’s iWeb software in February 2007.  Here I took the time to transfer the old posts to iWeb. However, I found Apple’s servers painfully slow, even when using CNAME to use my own domain (a .net rather than the .co.uk I’d been using).

So, fed up with Apple, I got started in WordPress.  I left the old .net site up for the few posts that were on that (the archive having vanished — all that work, another reason to ditch Apple), and went back to the .co.uk domain with WordPress.

Thanks to being skint for a bit, and not paying my hosting fee, my host deleted the site.  I then got them some dosh, had them do what they called a ‘site restore’ and ended up with everything but the posts themselves because I stupidly failed to have a backup of the MySQL database.  Rather than re-enter everything manually (again), I decided to just start again.

And that’s the story of the blog, and why it seems new.  For anyone who wants to, I have uploaded my original, nuts’n’bolts site, simply to make that content available again.  It’s not indexed and there’s no RSS or anything, but there it is.

I recommend my post on not meeting Ray Bradbury, but then I’m biased.

But not a shill.