Or, A Series of Unfortunate Events

Dear readers,

I have been unemployed since a mass layoff at my previous company, in January of 2009. In the months since that time, I have spent hundreds of hours developing free martial arts resources, on this martial arts blog, on the DojoScore Martial Arts Directory and elsewhere. This is my ongoing contribution to the global martial arts community; a partial payment in kind for all the gifts I have received from my teachers, students, peers and friends.

Nevertheless, I had originally hoped that this website could generate enough income to pay its own hosting bills, at least.

I am pleased to declare that Martial Development has become so popular, that it now exceeds the resource quotas established by my web hosting provider. They have graciously allowed the site to remain available, for the time being, despite the fact that I have not ponied up for a more expensive, extra-strength hosting plan. (They did force me to shut down the forums a few months ago, unfortunately, after it was targeted by spammers.)

In May 2010, Martial Development was singled out for exclusion from the world’s largest web advertising network. It was excluded for no good reason, in my opinion; but then, large corporations never need a good reason for their decisions. They didn’t even pay me the last month’s balance owed, but decided to hold the money for themselves!

And, having driven any serious competition to the margins of the industry, they left no suitable replacement for their advertising services, which provided the bulk of this website’s revenues. [Read more →]

Our recent and spirited discussion of “McDojos” and mob justice was recently picked up at another forum. Apparently, the forum administrator is upset that I turned off comments on the original post, because he didn’t get an opportunity to express his dissenting viewpoint. In the interests of fairness and education, I will summarize his rebuttal here. [Read more →]