2025-02-18. Going through my DayOne journal I found this post that apparently didn’t make it onto my website… so here it is almost three years later. Funny that I would get so busy with school that everything else would drop off and then just as school ended I’d come up with these huge blogging projects to tackle because I unhappy with whatever I was doing at the time. Ack. That hasn’t changed. Here’s the post:

An email showed up in my inbox about a blogging platform, Ghost, that I looked at years ago. When I initially looked into Ghost, it looked like way too much work to get it up and running, so I passed on it. At the time I was looking to simplify things and eventually ended up moving everything to WordPress.com and consolidated all of my blogs into one blog with using multiple categories instead of separate blogs for each subject. I kept my photography/video blog separate and experimented with SmugMug because they offered fast, unlimited hosting. Then school started and all these projects were more or less abandoned. 

This recent email about Ghost, has prompted me to consider my online presence and where I’d like to keep my stuff. But it more than where I host my blog(s), but also where I want to spend my energy to use this blogging to some end result. Yeah, I do seem to do this every couple years, often at the beginning of some break from school. But because of the short windows I’m working with, I never seem to finish the project(s). 

So here’s the current run down. My main blog, JoeBustillos.com is hosted at WordPress.com for $90 a year ($7.50 per month), offers 13 GB media storage, with no ads and video/MP3 hosting. Before switching to WordPress.com, I was used to unlimited media hosting across multiple sites, but the convenience of having WordPress run the server with no out-dated-plugins concerns is a definite plus. At the same time, not having access to plug-ins limited whatever customization I might have considered in the past. Right now I’m limited to using one theme which doesn’t quite work across my photography blog and my teaching or academic portfolios and the mostly defunct video podcast. In the past I had a plug-in with my academic portfolio that enabled things like using Endnotes (kind of an important need when posting academic documents). So I started looking at outside/third party hosting and moving my blogs there. 

But moving to a new platform isn’t a simple thing. I have been blogging for so long that I have over 14,000 posts and just in my joebustillos.com blog I’ve used over 6.5 GB media storage. Posts and especially media seem to load very slowly, which was why I moved my images to SmugMug. 

Speaking of SmugMug, when I signed up for SmugMug it was part of a deal with my long-term pro account with Flickr, I don’t remember what I paid the first year, maybe around $50. So I spent that summer break moving over 5,000 images and short videos to SmugMug and made it like the media blog I previously built in WordPress. My issue with photography blogs is that I want to present it like a paper with text leading to the images and I don’t want to limit myself to three or four images. If I shot 100 images at an event, I want to post all 100 images. 

Anyway, SmugMug was a bit clunky, but images loaded much faster than they did in Flickr or WordPress. That worked for me until I got a second year bill for over $200. If I were a professional photographer making money on my images that might have been okay, but it was way too much for my part-time hobbiest level. So I changed the SmugMug down from a Portfolio account to a Basic account at $9 per month or $75 per year. But in the process all of the blogging pages I’d created were deleted and I was left with a website with the images and videos hosted in folders with no documentation or comments. Ack. Then I got busy with another school year and it all went idle. 

When I think about it, it isn’t necessarily the money (though $200 was way too much for my needs…), but it’s all the time spent crafting the site(s) that get very few visitors or almost no traffic. Why the hell am i doing all of this work? Even the “bloggers” I’ve met through WordPress Meetup.com events are mostly business-persons using their blogs to sell stuff/services. I feel like the one weirdo who does this as a form of self-expression, divorced from any need to make money. Even when I was hanging with my independent-author friends in Florida, I was the only one with no independently Amazon-published novel, but began my intros with, “I blog.” Weirdo. 

I have a definite need to communicate and building websites/blogs gives me a lot of satisfaction. But it’s a hell of a lot of work for unknown results. I need to do better, certainly more than occasional posts on FaceBook. That’s not getting it done. 

So, it definitely looks like I’m going to go back to getting third-party web-hosting for my WordPress site(s), like I did back in 2004 (thanks to my Pepperdine buddy, Tina, who hosted my sites for free for a couple years). Off the bat I’m thinking of separating out the mostly silent video podcast, JBB’s Final Thoughts, to it’s own blog and will probably do the same for my other media endeavors, JBB’s Media Project. Although the separate media blog might still be supported with my SmugMug account, I just need to figure how to do it so that it’s a combination of storytelling and images without one overwhelming the other. Figuring out this media thing is going to be a whole other mountain to climb. More on that later. I also need to figure out how to move everything to the new blog with as little pain as possible. Well, I think I just discovered what my project is going to be for this summer break. Let’s call it: Project: No More Whistling in the Dark. 

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Tags: blogging, ghost cms, online presence, online publishing, smug mug, WordPress 

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