Here at the office, we’re sure glad to be past the long haul of winter. It’s been a gorgeous day here today, in the positive double digits!
Those of you who have horses on property know how challenging and time consuming winter chores can be, and they certainly were on the farm, too. Wading through snow up to your hips to feed horses when you’d rather stay inside where it’s warm certainly is what we call dedication!
Now that we’ve finally started to get to the season where you don’t have to thaw water pipes everyday to water your horses, and more into the season where you get mouthfuls of hair instead of air when you breathe, staff is hopefully going to be able to spend more time in the office, working on the site.
We’ve streamlined things a little bit and made navigation a little easier. We’ve gotten rid of a couple of sections that were not being used and are going to focus on our forum, classifieds, directory and stallion showcase first and foremost in 2008.
We’d like to have a bit of a presence at the trade shows and equine events going on so we are going to recommence our street team program and Horse willing, we would like to be able to send a t-shirt and some stickers or something like that along with those of you who are going to be making appearances at trade shows with your horses or with your products.
We are going to strive to be great in 2008!
Let me tell you how the last two weeks have gone down…. horribly!
We made the decision, since our contract was expiring with our server, to try and make a move to another host that would better be able to serve our forum needs. You don’t have to be a complete forum addict to know that at least once a week we were getting pitiful MySQL errors and when I brought the issue up with my host, they said it was the fault of another site on our server… but the problem kept recurring. They weren’t laying down the law with the other site! Nonetheless, we trudged along until we found Lunarpages, where we’ve now come to roost.
Things went relatively easy, moving all of the site content (and there is a LOT). Got everything moved over easily enough but the forum wasn’t working. After a lot of cursing and tech support, the forum was once again up and running. No sooner did a certain blonde girl in the office finish sending out a celebratory email to all of the eager beavers waiting for the forum to come back up then she accidentally deleted the entire directory that housed the forum…. whoops! Back to square one! This time lots of begging, pleading AND tech support was employed to get the forum back up and running.
Everything was running smoothly until last Monday (a week ago from the 22nd, our birthday!), when we awoke to find Canadian Neigh completely missing from the internetz! We were in a huge panic and found out that the new server had had an issue and wiped itself clean to get rid of bad things and the host didn’t have a backup that was younger than 9 days old (just a couple of days older than our partnership with Lunarpages!)… thus we began again, moving everything. For some reason, our forum backups were corrupted and this time we had to bring in the big guns, who promptly fixed the forum with a couple of tweaks here and there (we were drooling with awe at the technical prowess!)… and voila! Here we are again! We needed to take a couple of days to recuperate from the stress, and so we missed the official birthday of Canadian Neigh. We hope you will forgive us and that the site being up and running is consolation enough. We’ll have to throw a pretty incredible 2 year bash at this rate!