You guys are completely paranoid.

There is no telling the difference between a CD that iTunes ripped or aggregated from your disk (which might have been ripped prior to iTunes' existence). Remember MacAMP (or any *AMP)? How about SoundJam? There was music before iTunes. (I tell ya!)

They are SELLING you an online subscription to "upgrade" (ie, crossgrade) this music to their catalog. This way they can stream to your devices and... believe it or not... possible upcoming thin, storage-less inexpensive devices.

The only trap in there, if any, is user's reliance on a yearly subscription; how many times are you willing to pay for the music you already own?

Yeah I'm aware.

Thing is, given I have to move lots of stuff out of MobileMe before June 2012, I would rather make sure that any new site content be in a format that i know will be available in the futur and can still be edited with new content. In particular, photos out of my Galleries that were linked into forum posts will have to be relinked (cringe) off my new hosting. No way I'm going to redo that from iCloud albums. Screw the cloud: I want to own my data.

So, older content from iWeb is currently being pushed onto my new hosting as-is.

New content is being put into MediaWiki and SimpleMachine.

Am still looking for a decent photo sharing solution. Tying to decide between 4images, coppermine or Gallery.

No. Steve Jobs yanked the services out of reach. Happened with iTools, Dot mac groups and HomePage, iWeb & MobileMe.

Sure MobileMe will remain available until June 2012, but it doesn't change the fact that I have THOUSANDS of MobileMe Gallery -hosted images linked in hundreds of forum posts all over the next. I will have to relink those images.

So yeah: call that a gun to my head.

Yeah, I know. Was already using iWeb for a couple of other web stores via FTP.

I actually, last night, tested installation of a couple of solutions and moved *some* of my iWeb content to the new hosting. I will ultimately recode that to use SQL DB.

I moved some content into a new MediaWiki and installed SimpleMachine forum on there as well.

Still looking for a decent visual editor for the fluff stuff. But I will start to bring things down to a closer level to hand-coded. I just don't have the cash for DreamWeaver (certainly not worth it for this project) nor do I have much confidence in other tools.

The biggest tool was myself for trusting that Apple could actually be considered serious about any of its online services. They can go fsck themselves with iClouds. No way I`m pushing my data out of my reach.

Solid contender. I actually used Wikis a lot at work as it is integrated with the set of tools we develop (collectively).

Will have to examine this further as to how I can extend it with some SQL backend DB I need to hook up.

Thanks for the Wiki reminder.

So that's essentially an iWeb -style tool. Looks promising. Thanks for the pointer.

Thanks for the pointer. Will check it out.

I actually built a complete e-comerce web site by hand something like 13 years ago. With php scripts (or was it Perl?) and some c-based CGIs. The reason I switched to WYSIWYG is because I don't have time to deal with that and that given web site development is a far cry from my regular Application programming duties, would rather spend whatever is left of my "free" time with my kids than learning to deal with CSS.

One thing is for sure, China and Russia are very good at reverse engineering.

I have yet to see a convincing iPod or Concorde knock-off

8-)