A new home

I started the morning by blogging my entry for the Chevin Fell Race last night, only to find that the cyclosport.org server had gone down before I was able to save the post. After a few revisits, a message revealed that Mark Harding had pulled the entire site, quoting reasons of legalities and lack of support. If the site is down for good, then this is a very great shame indeed. Mark has put a huge amount of work into creating a community and I believe it had become the first port of call for thousands of cyclists wanting to get information on events. I did question for myself whether it was possible to make a living out of such a site, but it seems crazy that having built up such a large and loyal following, he has been compelled to leave the community high and dry, so to speak. I've developed these casual relationships with other bloggers that I'm not sure how I'm going to be able to rekindle.

I feel I owe Mark one for being the person responsible for getting me into this whole blogging experience in the first place, but I hope he has a good reason for pulling the plug. When you create a community I think you perhaps take on a certain responsibility towards that community and I would feel rather let down if this came down to petulance! For now, I'm sure there is enough speculation going on without me adding more. Mark, if you get to read this by some route, thank you for all the work you've put in, and your certainly significant role in promoting events and raising the standards. I hope you can find a way to get your venture back on track, perhaps, I would be so bold to suggest, as a paying hobby rather than a full-on career! I wish you luck.

As it happens, I've had another dormant blog account for some time now and I began last week to start archiving entries. Being 'in the business' I'm always a little paranoid about backing things up. A word of advice, if you don't have at least one copy of an electronic document, it may as well not exist. Copy everything of value. Again and again! You need the weight of many duplicates in order to lend some substantive quality to things that actually have an extremely intangible and ephemeral physical existence!! So, my blog has a new permanent home here courtesy of those nice people at google. Hopefully, I'll be around here for a while.