Hell and Backby SolitaireSome of you may have noticed that 3moons Castle went offline for a month and, of course, some of you may not care. I cared. I put 3 years of work into that site and a visitor bent on destruction made it possible for a publisher to end that 3 years in 3 minutes. I am now probably the leading expert on Internet copyright and the result of that is I'm never quoting anyone again, unless it's an immediate member of my family and then only with written permission that has been notarized. I would love to rant at the total unfairness of making me remove content that I duly cited not only by the name of the author and publisher, and even included the copyright dates. I would love to rant about the fact that what I borrowed was out of the book's appendix, but sometimes life isn't fair and being a publisher of books in the age of the Internet might make me just as cranky as the one I had to deal with. I took the site down rather than try to meet the publisher's deadline of 4 days to extract bits and pieces of quoted material scattered around the site like snowflakes and rewrite everything around it so that the missing piece wouldn't be missed. Gads what a job that would have been! But then I had this website with nothing on it at all ... Where does one begin when creating a website? It had been so long ago that I started mine, it was like another lifetime. I looked around for inspiration on the net. I went to all my favorite haunts and both started and ended here at IB. I found Community. Friends. Helping. Teaching. Sharing. Those things to me are synonymous with the Internet. My site was about being Wiccan. It attempted to teach tolerance and educate people who didn't know what it meant to believe differently than they did. I used to get email from people telling me I would end up in hell because of the content of my site. Well, I can safely say that I have been to hell and I'm back. I'm back because of the encouragement of Jeff Clark and others like him. I'm back because the pixels get into your bloodstream and you can't walk past the computer without logging on. If where I went because of the content of my site was hell, then hell isn't so bad because I seem to have friends there.
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