ShamSports.com is written, owned, conceived, created and
undermined by one person, an Englishman called Mark. This man has a lot
of free time on his hands, but he has kissed a girl, contrary to popular
belief. (Note: This has not been independently verified.)
This man also likes to keep up a rather immature air of mystique concerning
the personality behind the snarky writing, and that's why this page will
not be adorned with a picture of him. However, he ever so slightly looks
like how
Jason
Kapono does if you stand with your chin on Kapono's breastplate
and look upwards. Well, something like that. So let your imagination run
wild there.
(Why you would be doing this to The Kap is another matter entirely. Mind
you, I would.)
The website is named after his internet message board username, Sham.
That name is a truncated form of the original username, ShamBulls, a pun
on the world "shambles" featuring the name of his favourite
team (the
Bulls), and an
accurate description of how shite they were in 2002. It was all very high
brow and mature stuff, obviously. The name for the website was NOT chosen
as some kind of egomaniacal desire to make everything all about himself,
but because he couldn't think of a better alternative. The only other
option -
nbabasketballwebsite.com - may not have been seen by the
general public as an ironic name, as it was intended to be. Failing that,
the only other options were bad things like
hoopshaven.com, a stupid
suggestion if only for the fact that it violates the internet's unwritten
rule of never having the word "shaven" in your URL.
The website was originally designed only to be a set of forums where a
little group of kids that were too cool for even the coolest crowd could
hang out and run their ignorant mouths in their own unregulated sanctuary,
where nobody could call them stupid and make them feel bad (and where
they could also swear profusely, a luxury that I still enjoy). Again,
more high brow stuff. This was back in early 2005. The evolution of the
website has since progressed as follows:
Construct forums,
invite small clique of friends. Play nicely.
Expand them, and
start adding information about stuff in sub forums.
Decide that such
information is best procured in page format. Start creating accompanying
pages for the forums. Realise that you have no idea of how to go about
this.
Steal other people's
HTML and figure out the basics of the language.
Create so many accompanying
pages that eventually you have a fledgling website on your hands. Realise
that you have a tool here to be able to put the things on an NBA website
that you've always thought that other sites should have.
Spend several months
creating said website without the public seeing what you're doing. Eventually
corral one of your real life computer programmy friends into helping you
make something that's actually practical.
Launch your now-somewhat-practical-if-truly-uninspiring
website, in a rather hideous strain of gothic black.
Over the following
months, expand and update the thing, before realising that it is awful.
Re-design it in
a less garish, more blue, and more practical way, while also making sure
that the information that you are providing is actually
right.
Become a right old
NBA basketball nerd who knows everything and who has no real life friends.
Realise that no
one actually views any of what you write, because all they want to do
is look at the picture archives that you've collated.
Remove said picture
archives. Add a blog to the front page, and begin re-writing player profiles
into such a way that they may be considered readable. Change the website's
entire direction, from "site with amusing stuff on it" to "bloody
useful resource that happens to be written by a very cynical bastard".
Remove the forums
because they were crap.
Write this page.
And so now we've come full circle.
Ideas for this website that have been explored/experimented with in the
past include in-depth statistics, salary databasing, media, transactions
databasing, an expansion into baseball, news feeds, piles and piles of
useful historical data, and other such nerdy things that only a small
minority of the hardened pathetic would ever want. Some of these may be
revisited. But for right now, it's all about the scornful observations.
Future ideas that haven't been entirely dismissed include the forming
of a staff of unpaid writers who think they're funny but aren't really
(like me), podcasts, mailbags, interviews, and just generally more words
and that.
This website has featured on
AOL.com,
ESPN.com,
TrueHoop,
Yahoo Sports,
Spanish television (apparently), and all manner
of other places ranging from the notorious to the best-kept-quiet. (It
was once in a racist hatred petition for some bizarre reason. I sure as
hell didn't put it there.) This isn't bad going considering that neither
I, nor anyone, has made any attempt to ever advertise it in any way. It
is now three years old, and still nowhere near complete, which says a
lot about both my fits-and-starts motivation, and also the frequent and
decimating direction changes that it goes through every few months. The
direction right now, though, remains firmly towards the single goal of
ruling the world. Represent.
(Oh by the way, I've knocked off the talking-in-the-third-person thing
that opened this page. Came across a bit weirdly, didn't it?)
ShamSports.com also features no adverts, partly due to manageable running
costs due to its relatively low bandwidth, but also because I'm a raging
philanthropist who you should totally want to take to bed and ruin. If
you're a girl. (And remember: as far as you need to know, I look like
Jason Kapono. So yes, you do want to bed me. It's not even a remotely
good likeness, and I actually look more like
Maciej Lampe. But me and
Kapono have the same hair shape, so let's run with that.)
This website is built and maintained in Macromedia Dreamweaver 4, which
is proof of the fact that I have absolutely no idea what I am doing.
And it's blue because I LIKE blue. The day you pay the bills is the day
that you dictate the colour scheme.
