Welcome to Blog From The Darkside.

I’m Steve Calvert and this is a resurrected version of my first blog.

These days I move from country to country and make my living as a freelance writer, but in 2006 I was living in the UK and pursuing my passion for horror writing. I’d already sold a few short stories and decided I needed a website, so I built one and it eventually evolved into an online horror resource. I don’t have time to write horror stories or reviews these days, but the site is still online and, if you want to, you can visit it by clicking HERE

A few months after I built my horror website I built a horror blog and hosted it on a separate domain. I called it Blog From The Darkside, it became quite popular, and a lot of people said how much they loved the name. Around two years later, on May 5th, 2008, I decided that I would add a news feed to the blog’s footer. While I was doing this I found a lot of links had been added to the footer file. I have no idea how long they had been there and if I had not decided to add a news feed I might never have discovered the problem.

This discovery was very worrying for me so I visited the blog and took a look at the page source and discovered that the header file had also been hacked into and a lot of outgoing links had been added to it. All of the links added to my blog included an instruction for them to be hidden. I didn’t know that they were there and neither would any visitors to the blog unless they took a look at the page source. The search engines, of course, would see all of these links and then spider them, giving the person who added the links lots and lots (there were hundreds of them) of free links into their own sites and the sites that they were obviously affiliated to.

I removed all of these links immediately and changed all relevant passwords.

Two days later I checked the page source again and the links had been replaced. There were somewhere in the region of 250-300 outgoing links and it is my belief that it was the WordPress software that had been hacked into rather than my server. But I will probably never find out for sure, although I have got a very good idea how all of this was achieved. Anyway, I took the site down at once. It was my hope that I could maybe rebuild the site from the Mysql tables. When I opened up the tables and had a good look through them I found that they had been corrupted beyond repair and corrupted is a very good word. Hidden amongst all of the blog’s genuine comments where a great many hidden comments. All with outgoing links, most of which were to sites of a very adult nature. At that time I lacked the skill to repair the damage that had been done.

In Augusts 2010, I built a new Blog From The Darkside, using a different content management system (CMS). All the posts were new, but I lost interest in the blog, took it down and replaced it with my present blog, Gather No Moss.

Gather No Moss is not a horror blog. I write about the places and things I see on my travels, my life as a writer, and also about my minimalist lifestyle. Gather No Moss and Blog From The Darkside are as different as chalk and cheese. In December 2016, I was examining the analytic data for Gather No Moss and I realised a lot of people were landing on the site via links leading into posts I’d written for Blog From The Darkside—posts that were no longer there. I decided to build a third and final version of the blog and automatically redirect the none existent (Gather No Moss) URLS the correct page on Blog From The Darkside no.3. I have also found a way to reclaim much of the original content from the first blog, so I am adding that as well. Unfortunately, most of the comments have been lost.

I still have to write content for my clients, and I am also busy rebuilding my horror site because the old pages are not mobile-friendly, so this project may take a while.