If there is one of my friends that deserves the title “martial arts guru”, it’s Ste – nearing his black belt in Jiujitsu, after he trained Shaolin Kung Fu for five years, with excourses in various other martial arts (Judo when he was a kid, Kickboxing, Vovinam, Capoeira, training with police instructors and some Wing Chun) and decades of experience, he knows what he’s talking about – in particular, he knows what he’s talking about when the subject is self-defense.

So, he made a blog. From his post about what self-defense actually is:

Self-defense is the ability to come out of violent situations alive and if possible unhurt and with all of your possessions. For most persons, self-defense is learning how to beat someone up (or use any other suitable technique like throws, locks,…). This is the stuff you will learn in most martial-arts or self-defense classes. Unfortunately this is only a part of the whole self-defense business.

Learn more on Ste’s self-defense Blog!

Bye Slug.ch

As a rather important sidenote: There I was, thinking I’d have done a great service for Ste when I told him that the best thing he could do to promote his shiny new blog was sign it up for all those blog directories (link German) we have in Switzerland. I guess the advice wasn’t all bad (despite the fact that this blog here isn’t really old either), after all I do get some visits from those as well…

But today, I looked at one of them, Slug.ch, and was greeted with a short “bye” message. Well, uhm … bye, I guess I wonder if we’ll ever find out what it was that made Benny Rüegg stop?

BloggingTom doesn’t know much more (link German), but he has plenty of nice links for web history nuts (like me), and way more of them can be found at tou.ch.

Update 08-09-19 13:01: Meh, Slug.ch is back online. I agree with BloggingTom when he writes:

Hey, Benny, immer dieses Hin und Her mit Slug. Da kommt man ja kaum noch hinterher!

Unlike him though, I do think that such aggregators do serve an important function in the blogosphere: They allow you to find blogs you might like, they allow new bloggers to introduce their blog to a wider audience, and they allow searches through a particular subset of the global blogosphere.

All of those are important functionalities that hold us all together – so if Slug is not it, because of all those “sell-keep” and “stop-restart” inconsistencies, it’d have to be something else. I guess the fact that nothing else is as technically refined as Slug is then also the reason for the big backlash the too short “bye” message provoked.