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An Epilogue Maintained by Debbie Ridpath Ohi Update: Xlibris sold the Inkspot.com domain as a traffic funnel for Writing.com. What to do if you see a link to Inkspot.com (a heartfelt plea)After six years of operation (with nearly 50,000 subscribers, 200,000 unique site visitors and over 400,000 page views a month), Inkspot was shut down by Xlibris on February 14th, 2001, eight months after being acquired by the company. Xlibris cited budget cuts for their decision. See this Wired article. The discussion forums were moved to Writers' BBS (but see below). You also can find farewell messages from staff (including my own) and Inkspot users below. I've started up a weblog for writers called Inkygirl. You can find out more about what I'm up to by visiting my personal homepage, my daily journal, or my semi-autobiographical comic strip. I currently am the Market Watch columnist for WritersMarket.com. And if you haven't already, don't forget to visit Moira Allen's Writing World, which is packed with useful articles, columns and links for writers, and also offers a free e-mail newsletter. Thanks so much for all your letters of support and encouragement; they're much appreciated. Keeping writing, Debbie
InformationPress clippings, awards, past user feedbackFarewell messages: Inkspot staff Inkspot's disappearing? Where should I go instead?!
In the Community and PressCommunityPress:
Content Spotlight (Feb.19/2001) Publisher's Weekly (Feb.19/2001) Wired News (Feb.21/2001) Inside.com (Feb.15/2001)
Columns RelocationFrom Margaret Shauers: The March issue of the Children's Writer's Marketplace (formerly sponsored by Inkspot) is now online at http://bookbarn.odsys.net/childmkt/. All of us will miss Debbie Ridpath and the great Inkspot site. We hope children's writers will click into the new column site and support it as you have done over the years. Please let us know if other former Inkspot sites and offerings show up elsewhere. And anyone who has a site, let me know--maybe we can swap links! Margaret Shauers and Jerry Crotinger
Discussion ForumsBrian Rickman has kindly agreed to host the discussion forums formerly part of Inkspot. New URL: http://www.writersbbs.com/inkspot/. The Young Writers' Speculative Fiction group has moved to: The Inkspotted Phoenix.
NewsletterMoira Allen is publishing an Inklings-like newsletter for writers on her site, Writing-World.com. You can also find lots of articles and resources here, as well as Moira's column, Freelancing 101. Sal Towse has an excellent resource for writers at: |
What to do if you see a link to Inkspot.com
(a heartfelt plea)
Some of you may already know that I used to run a site for writers called Inkspot. It was one of the first writers' sites on the Web, and you can read about what happened on the Inkspot Epilogue page.
Many sites still link to Inkspot.com, unfortunately. Which is probably why Xlibris sold (or gave) the Inkspot.com domain to Writing.com some years ago. The latter appears to be using the domain as a traffic funnel; anyone trying to reach any of the pages on my old site for writers is now being pushed to Writing.com, with no mention of the redirect; many users probably assume they're visiting a new incarnation of Inkspot.
Before I started Inkspot, I used to host some author Web sites. One of these was Charles Ghigna, a wonderful poet and author. Unfortunately some sites still link to HIS old Inkspot URL, and these links now take people to Writing.com. :-( The correct URL for his site, by the way, is http://www.charlesghigna.com/.
Anyway, here's my plea.
If you have a link to Inkspot, PLEASE DELETE IT.
If you notice someone linking to the old Inkspot site, PLEASE LET THEM KNOW IT NO LONGER EXISTS and that the URL is actually being re-routed to another site, or point them to this post.
Right now, so many sites are still linking to the old URL that Google still gives anything@inkspot.com a higher position in rankings than it should. I've been gradually contacting sites myself, but there are so many.
Many thanks.