In my recent interviews with Cornfedtech, I discussed the origin of the name “ForkBombr” and neglected to tell the whole story, as I was just reminded of by Kevin Lipe. Here’s the crux of the matter:
Well, I have to admit that “logic bomb” sounded cooler to me, but I figured “Fork Bomber” would make a better blog title. I was right. This was about the time that Flickr and a few other “Web 2.0” sites were first starting to pop up, and they were all missing vowels from their names. I figured I’d be a smart aleck and call my blog “Fork Bombr.**” The site went live. Eventually I got a tumblelog and decided to move Fork Bombr there. I got a hosting account and registered the domain name a couple years later and started blogging there in the summer of 2007.
[…]
Meanwhile, I was talking to Stephen, who I’ve said in other posts was my boss while I was at Apple, about the domain name forkbombr.net and he said he would like to buy it from me if I didn’t want it anymore. It was about to expire anyway, so I sold it to him for the price of one lunch at the Memphis Pizza Café across the street from the Apple Store.
Eventually, both of us found ourselves no longer working at Apple, and we both started blogging again, building new sites and templates. I started here at The Killer Poke (neé Halt & Catch Fire) and he started at Fork Bombr, building a cool template and awesome site there in the smoldering ruins of my bad, barely-read blog. At this point I think it’s important to point out that this isn’t sour grapes over web traffic or popularity—Stephen has very consciously positioned himself as a Mac journalist, because that’s what he’s good at, and that requires a lot of traffic, while I’ve mainly been entertaining myself here at The Killer Poke, writing for my own enjoyment. Traffic is not what I’m after.
Kevin’s right — I neglected to tell that part of the story in my interview.
Transparency is good, and is something I always strive for here. So here it is: Kevin Lipe Was The Brilliant Genius Who Thought ForkBombr Was A Good Blog Title.
And I bought the domain for some pizza.
**When I took the domain, I changed the name from “Fork Bombr” to “ForkBombr” — removing the space between the two words.