How scottpatten.ca came to be

published Jul 27, 2010

I was happily working away on Leanpub one day when I got a phone call. It was some guy from the city of Vancouver asking why I hadn’t paid for my business license for spatten design.

I explained that I was no longer running spatten design as a business, so there was obviously no need to pay the $200 per year fee. Seemed pretty straight forward to me.

Unfortunately, he wasn’t buying any of that. He had gone all CSI on me and done a Google search for spatten design and found a (gasp!) running web site at http://spattendesign.com. There was a website running called spattendesign.com, therefore I was still in business.

Q E fucking D.

He was quite proud of his cyber sleuthing skills, and didn’t want to hear that the fact that the website was running had no bearing on whether or not I was running it as a business.

The front page of the site looked like this at the time:

spattendesign.com on May 3rd, 2010

Note a few things: 1. It says I work full time at Ruboss 2. The latest blog post was on April 20th. That’s April 20th, 2009. 3. There’s no mention that I do any consulting work as spatten design (and I don’t! Trust me, running a startup and a consultancy is enough work for me.)

I tried to explain that there were useful things on that site that people still used (mostly the S3 synch plugin), but he didn’t really care. The only thing I could do to avoid paying $200/year for a business license for a business that does not exist was take down the web site.

After a long and rather unfruitful discussion, I basically hung up on him.

So, here we are. I’ve made spattendesign.com redirect to scottpatten.ca. Hopefully that’s close enough to taking down the site that I don’t get another call from the Googler extraordinaire from the City of Vancouver.

On the plus side, I finally registered scottpatten.ca, and I had a great time getting this site up and running with Jekyll, and got rid of the old blog, which had been running on an old and creaky install of Mephisto. Also, Jekyll makes me actually want to blog (like a hacker).

Don’t worry, this is as close as I get to ranting. Your very irregularly scheduled technical posts will be coming back soon.

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