blogging - we're going to need more monkeys
blogging – we’re going to need more monkeys

While I was trying to wrap my head around the realization that I’d spent the equivalent to a laptop in order to service my 11-year old Prius, I was cleaning up my email and I saw a message from my blog host from March that I’d saved but hadn’t mentally registered. But what caught my attention today was that they were saying that they were going to adjust the annual fee for my account to over $300 because I was using too much space on an account that I could have sworn said “unlimited storage” when I signed up for it two years ago. And the fee will be charged on May 15th. What? A couple days ago I had a dream where I was calling out to my friends for help and they said that they didn’t know how to respond because I sounded so calm. I told them that that is a sign that I’m really pissed off. This email message reminded me of that dream. Someone just took something from me that I’m not happy about (hint: how much it cost to service my aging Prius) and the next person who tries a similar trick is going to find me a bit less cooperative. Fuck. 

I’m the only nerd I know who does the whole “blogging” thing to begin with. But then I have to go the extra mile and spend huge sums of money every year for the past twenty years for hosting and themes and plug-ins just so that the website(s) look just the way that I want them to look. Then, back in the day when I went to meetings with other bloggers, I realized that I was one of the few folks there who wasn’t doing this to make money. Basically I’m the only idiot that I know who regularly “blogs,” much less spends as much time and money as I do on this stuff AND I’m not motivated in the least to do this to make money. What a fucking weirdo.

A couple of months ago, when I started to do a redesign of my main blog , I looked at what one of my author friends was doing online and he was still using his wordpress.com site  with an occasional post on various speaking engagements and links to his books. Admittedly his blog is just a way for him to sell his books and have an online presence. As with most published authors whom I know, his real income is from his day job teaching at a university in Florida and not as a published book author. My point is that his online efforts look to be in balance with his writing endeavors and I doubt that he’s spending too much on his wordpress.com site. Me, on the other hand, I can’t help but to spend hundreds every year on a website that I think looks great but doesn’t move the needle at all as far as being self funding or even contributing to whatever it is that I think I’m doing. This is dumb. It’s really making me rethink whether I want to do this online shit at all anymore. 

When I got home after having my car serviced (did I mention, at a price that was equivalent to buying a new laptop!), I went down a rabbit hole and started looking into how much I was paying for my online “presence.” Ugh. This is sad. Back when I started this whole in the early 2000s my blogs were hosted for free on LiveJournal and then a friend gave me free space on her WordPress server. The actual expense back then was the annual fees I started accumulating from the collection of domain names (all the doc-coms and dot-nets) that I was spending money on. But isn’t that how most unfortunate habits begin, spending twenty bucks here and thirty bucks there and before you know if you’re spending over $200 a year on a bunch of domain names that no one visits and that generate no traffic much less actual revenue. Apparently, as long as you don’t try to charge me more than $40 a pop then I don’t even think about it. Hell, I seem to be okay spending $200 year for hosting my blogs. But when I see that you want over $300 for hosting or anything somehow I suddenly notice that this is too much money to be spending with no actual plan. Ugh.

I originally thought that I was “only” spending money on domain names and not hosting, but it looks like I’ve been funding this online addiction since 2005. Like most closeted obsessives, I have relatively complete records on how much money I’ve spent going all the way back to 2005. I’d really rather not air all of this dirty laundry in all of its sad glory. Damn. Curse my very complete digital records. 

The problem, well, the problem this time is that I went into my latest blogging endeavor, switching from my $180 WordPress.com site to another hosting vendor, thinking that I could create an online photographic journal with all of my work posted going all the way back to when I started recording things going back to the 1970s. I thought the hosting plan I was paying for was unlimited and all I needed to do with keep the size of the image files small enough so that load times would not be horrible (anything video goes to my “free” YouTube account and then embedded on my blog so nothing is spent there). My first year cost less than $75 for two blogs (one for my written journalism/creative writing stuff and one for my photography/video stuff). I didn’t seem to notice when they charged me $179 for the same account for the second year. It took the “over $300” to renew my account email for me to notice that something was wrong. Really, I seem to have a problem because this isn’t the first time I haven’t figured out that it’s expensive to post images online (at least the way I want to post them). 

I tried to host images on Flickr.com and then on my WordPress.com accounts, But left those accounts either because I ran out of space (WordPress) or because they started to load really slowly, to the point of being unusable (Flickr and WordPress). Then when SmugMug, a professional photography hosting site, bought Flickr I got one of their accounts for $75 a year. SmugMug knew how to deal with and host full sized images, had unlimited storage and the account I had let me build webpages for my video projects too.  Then when I got the bill for year two is was over $200. That was bad, but the kicker was that I couldn’t easily posted any of my image galleries on my WordPress site. So I went back to a cheaper “basic” account on SmugMug and tried to find a better solution on the WordPress side. Which I thought wasn’t on the WordPress.com side and led me to my current WordPress host (this is the fourth time I’ve tried a third party host… what does that tell you?). 

Way back when, when Flickr was a cool place to host images, they had plugins that you could use where a gallery of images hosted on Flickr could be embedded on to ones personal blog with just a line of code. Then something broke along the way and Flickr got slow and I moved on. But I knew that there were ways to do that same thing, to upload the image files on a website like Flickr or SmugMug, where hosting is cheap(er) and then with some code have the image gallery show up on ones WordPress blog posts. I tried to do this back in 2021 when I was building the gallery for all of the images I used for my mom’s memorial webpage, but it didn’t work on my WordPress.com website and seemed to have some problems on my news third party WordPress website. But when I looked into options this week I found a plugin (piece of code) that I could use on my WordPress posts where I could call up galleries hosted on my SmugMug account and have the images and videos show up in WordPress. 

SmugMug OHD gallery example
SmugMug OHD gallery example

So I have spent the past week experimenting with getting rid of images and videos hosted on my WordPress site and using images that I had already uploaded to my SmugMug account and it seems to work. The question is whether, by hosting almost all of my images on my SmugMug account I can knock down the cost of my WordPress site down enough to justify all of this work. Seriously, I’m sure that I’m the only one who give a shit about any of this, but I like having my memories posted in a way that it’s just a click away from enjoying from anywhere with an Internet connection. That’s the dream at least. It turns out to be a rather difficult and expensive dream. To be continued…

Easton Blogging Poster
Easton Blogging Poster

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Tags: blogging, blogging history, expensive tech hobbies, first world issues, WordPress hosting issues

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