First Off as always a big Thank You to Alison S. for your donation to the website. They help out a Whole lot with the cost and time spent on the site. I truly appreciate it Alison and Thanks again 🙂 Like you mentioned, the site is here to have some fun and to help pass the season by.
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Keep in mind that this is about how the website got started and when I got involved in OUR contest and also about how the whole contest started to begin with.  The part about how the contest started is by Sean Kirst and his article below which is awesome at explaining it. That article also started the resurrection of the snow contest.
I was reminiscing this week while answering emails and comments about when I first started the website site and how much it has grown since then. I was wondering how long I have been keeping the snow stats, how long I have been the scorekeeper for OUR Golden Snowball contest and how long the site has been around. I just took a look as to when I started the website up.  I bought the domain name goldensnowball.com on January 23rd, 2003 at exactly at 6:32:59 am. Most likely that isn’t EST because I doubt I would have been up that early 😉 So as of Jan. 23rd this year it would have been 11 years since the website started and since I got involved in the snow contest.
All I can say is it has been a blast the whole time but with that said let’s give credit where credit is due which is with Syracuse’s own beloved columnist for the Post Standard and Syracuse.com, Sean Kirst. More on Sean in a bit though because right now it’s about me, me, me, Marsha, Marsha, Marsha 🙂  Back in 2003 I heard something mentioned on one of the local news stations about a NY snow contest from the past that may be started up again.  So I decided to go online and check it out.  I wanted to see what it was all about and I came across an article that Sean had written about the contest which I am going to post below because it covers the contest from the beginning to where we are today. It’s a must read to learn all about the Golden Snowball contest.
The Golden Snowball contest goes way back to the late 1970’s but it stalled out for a bit. No, not because we didn’t get any snow those seasons but most likely because some of the National Weather Service stations were closed down. You’ll read all about it when you read Sean’s article. OK, it looks like we are back to Sean Kirst again 😉 He wrote an article about the old contest back in 2001 which is the first one I read back in 2003. I looked around to see if there was a site for the contest and there wasn’t so I thought Hey, why not give it a shot and see where it goes. I did think Hey, really I did 🙂
So I started the website up and the first season would have been half way through the 2002 – 2003 snow season. The site had something like 300 visitors. The next season the snow site got about 5000 visits and it seemed to double each season for awhile. This season the Golden Snowball site should have over a quarter of a million visits to the site and more than half a million page views. It’s nice to see that every season more and more people become interested in the snow contest. Like I said, it’s been a blast the whole time. So much fun that I decided to start up the Snowiest Big City in the United States snow contest which you can check out at www.goldensnowglobe.com
OK, back to Sean 🙂 (man did I bounce around)Below is an Awesome link to the first article about the contest by Sean Kirst that explains just about everything there is to know about the Golden Snowball contest from the beginning to where it is today. http://www.syracuse.com/kirst/index.ssf/2014/01/the_real_snow_kings_syracuse_a.html
Have a Great Weekend All 🙂
