I just captured this picture from our weather webcam (at lakevilleweather.com) that points out into the backyard. 9 days ago, when I posted this entry, the view from the webcam looked like this:

So, what happened to all the snow? 40 degree weather and about a 1/3 inch of rainfall yesterday decimated it. Oh, and it became so warm before the rain that the topsoil thawed (hence the nice green grass as opposed to dormant brown).

Local weather wonks are saying less than a 30% chance now of a white Christmas this year. But lets remember, this is Minnesota. Anything is possible!

So, here were are. Yet another attempt at keeping a valid, active, actually used, actually read, weblog on the meggisi.org website. I think this might be the 5th time I have either installed or re-installed, or reformatted, or rebuilt a blog platform for the site since I started the domain about 4.5 years back. The latest chapter in website history was written due to a complete and utter failure of my former web hosting provider, aplus.net, to actually host the website I had constructed. This was true for meggisi.org and it’s sister site lakevilleweather.com. They evidently experienced a change in ownership last spring/summer and thus, also experienced a change in infrastructure. This meant migrating all of their shared hosting clients to a new server platform. Supposedly, everything was to be seamless. All coding changes that were necessary were to be accomplished by their support team, and you wouldn’t have much of a hiccup in service other than being able to do file transfers, content management, etc, for about a week. None of that happened for me.

Without going into too much technical detail, the one very basic, simple thing aplus.net got wrong with my websites was the ability to run CGI scripts. That was it. Pretty simple. When they shut down that ability for me, the content management system I used (Movable Type) was rendered inoperative. Everything ground to a halt. I had to rebuild both websites — from the ground up — without Movable Type, or any CMS for that matter (a).

So, now I am with GoDaddy. On the good word of several people, and a lengthy review of the company, I hooked up with them last week. So far, so good. I am actually very impressed — the user interfaces/control panels, customer support, ease of transition, speed of service, and most importantly the price has lived up to the hype (b).

I have kept a simple homepage up and running for meggisi.org, but am now trying out the WordPress installation which came free with the GoDaddy package as my new platform for blogging. Let’s see how far this goes.

(a) Aplus.net did have a Joomla! installer in their package and user control panel for hosting services – which I tried to use in lieu of my beloved Movable Type. However, their botched server move rendered this useless as well. You couldn’t even install and run a simple PHP-SQL database function. It was all just plain useless. It was like someone without the first clue on how the internet works did the platform switch for them.

(b) The company is well known for its “racy” advertising and its risk-taking-venture-capitalist founder and CEO Bob Parsons, who does weekly webcasts. It is by many measures, “over the top” in the way of internet marketing. But they are making millions of dollars during this very weak economy, and I say, cheers to them!