Things I Wish I Could Remember

Starting in 2009, I set up, hosted, and provided basic admin help for two blogs on subdomains at Rational Review:

A Passion For Liberty -- Tibor R. Machan @ Rational Review
J. Neil Schulman @ Rational Review

Neither of those bloggers are with us anymore -- Neil died yesterday, Dr. Machan died in 2016.

I suppose at some point I will make sure the final states of the sites are archived at The Wayback Machine and remove them from my hosting space, but there's no hurry. Heck, I may just leave them running in their current state. Both bloggers did agree to give me ad space. Haven't used that space in a long time. Maybe I'll start.

What bugs me is that I can't remember just why and how it came to be that I hosted Neil's blog in the first place.

Dr. Machan was having some kind of problem with a different pre-fab blog site, and also received frequent typo corrections from me (via email) on material that went up on that site, for which he expressed gratitude. Eventually I offered him a blog directly on my site. He was happy to have someone do the set-up work on a "real" blog and do very basic editing (spelling corrections, etc.) for him so that he could focus on the writing rather than on administrative BS.

But I can't remember what the deal with Neil was, and that bothers me. I have a policy of deleting emails that are more than a year old, so I can't go back and find out.

He knew basic HTML, and he maintained several sites of his own for e.g. his Pulpless e-book operation. Maybe he wanted to use Wordpress but didn't want to be bothered with learning yet another content management system or something.

The "intellectual property" status of content on both those blogs is a matter for the authors' estates, by the way. I don't accept the premise of IP, and I agreed with both of those bloggers beforehand that I would assert no IP claims on whatever they chose to publish on the web space.