Dehosted and Rehosted

I haven't put much effort into my personal web site in quite a while. There was not much point. I'm not selling anything. I'm horrible at blogging (I have a couple of infrequently updated channels). It was fun to play around with HTML and some layouts and graphics, back in the day. But it was easy to just ignore it. There were plenty of other ways to spend my time and effort (or not).

Then Comcast forced my hand.

Since I use them as my Internet provider, I have been hosting what little content I did have on their free service. It had a somewhat ugly URL (http://home.comcast.net/~billwnet/), but that was easily dealt with by simply forwarding my much easier to type domain (billw.net) there. They recently decided to discontinue the free hosting. I had to find a new place to host my stuff.

My options:

1. As a consolation for discontinuing the web hosting service, Comcast gave their subscribers two years of a Pro subscription to Weebly.com. Weebly offers drag-and-drop web site construction and a spectrum of features and services.
2. Add hosting to one of my GoDaddy domain registrations. This would allow me to either upload my existing, but lame, web content or use their web site constructor to create something more interesting. Either way would cost me a little more each month.
3. Research and find another way to get free, or almost free, hosting. Been there, done that. I'd probably wind up and someplace like Squarespace.com (a Weebly competitor) or back at GoDaddy.

For now, I'm going with option #1. Why not? It's paid for (for two years). The functionality seems fairly reasonable. It even takes care of making the site compatible with the smartphone form factor and I can use one of my existing domains for it. The only thing is, I can't just upload my existing site content (just a bunch of HTML). I need to recreate it. I might as well take the opportunity to update what I have and make it more attractive.

More on that in a subsequent post. For now, you can find my new web site (in progress, under construction and all that) at billweinberger.net.