WELCOME BACK

If you could not find the site during the past eight days then welcome back (thanks to the publishers of each of the five local club sites who provided links to the temporary address).  Since manxathletics.com was launched almost 11 years ago, it has been hosted by a company called oneandone.co.uk  Today I received an email from them saying: "As a result of our current print and TV advertising, an ever-growing number of people recognise 1&1 as a brand. 1&1 MyWebsite is also gaining recognition as THE customised website solution for companies, associations and professionals."’ The email provided me with an opportunity to earn up to £90 by referring my friends to them as new customers. There is more chance of me taking up the high jump than of me making such a recommendation.

I had been warned that an upgrade to their servers would lead to a 10-15 minute break of service overnight last Monday.  When the site was still missing after several hours I asked for an explanation and was told that a file was damaged and that I should fix it.  That was difficult because I was locked out of my account. The good decision I made was to create a new account at warewelchwebhosting.co.uk where I have hosted the parishwalk.com site for the past four years. After oneandone.co.uk failed to fix my account I applied to switch the manxathletics.com domain to this new warewelchwebhosting.co.uk  account.  This should have taken a day or two but has taken oneandone.co.uk  six days to achieve.  In the meantime I continued to chase them to get the old site working – I have published many of my emails on the blog below. There were a number of technical problems. My account had been switched to a different type (where you create your pages remotely rather than creating them locally and uploading them); the changes I then made did not show up on their servers and even when I managed to change the settings to point to the new site it did not work.  All 12 of the support staff  who responded to me were helpful but the company obviously suffers from appalling communication problems because the staff were blissfully unaware of the technical failings and kept tellling me "it should work now" when it didn’t.

After the problems with the bravenet.com site a couple of years ago (where the forum used to be) and with the fotopic.net site going out of business I really was beginning to feel that events were conspiring against me. Anyway, that’s all behind me now. I have been scanning more old documents that ever before during the past couple of weeks and some of these archive files are already finding their way onto the site. I am also working on the launch of the parishwalk.com website which goes live next week. Don’t forget to use the forum which is located at manxathletics.info  but I hope that the return of this site will also help you to find information, directly and indirectly, and to enjoy our sport.  

Murray Lambden 22 November 2011

number of visitors to the site each day this month.