Meditations On: What Happens to My Blog After I’m Gone

1991-06 COMM319 Photojournalism - Slides - Casual- Frustrated Writer -12 — **1991-06 COMM319 Photojournalism – Slides – Casual- Frustrated Writer -12**

I’ve been working pretty hard over the years on my website(s), trying to gather together my various writings from the collection of blogs and websites I’ve created over the decades. I’ve been keeping some kind of journal since first going to college in 1976 and switched from handwritten efforts to experiments using computers in 1986. I started creating websites in earnest when I began working on my Masters in Educational Technology in 2001, and really started using blogs in 2003, with my first LiveJournal account. Writing was my therapy, so I was just looking for a place where I could express myself, think out loud as it were and move on. I had no aspirations to sharing these thoughts with the world, though I thought that I had at least one book in me and kept that thought as I pounded away at the keyboard, working through whatever confusion I found myself entangled in.

And besides the price of the computers I was using and later the cost of connecting to the Internet, I chose free platforms like LiveJournal and then GeekLog and Blogger and eventually a friend introduced me to WordPress (circa 2005). I eventually got my own domain, from GoDaddy, then when they went weird I experimented with one or two other web-hosts. I eventually discovered that WordPress had free hosting. That was great and there was a built in community and I was okay with it.

The problem was that the free account was very limited and when I started experimenting with creating a photography portfolio, WordPress was just too slow loading images and I wanted to also embed video. I soon found myself back on a third party hosting service and moving my images and videos to Flickr and YouTube and Vimeo and …. Right now, in August of 2024, I have over 15 WordPress blogs, and have images and videos hosted on Flickr and SmugMug and videos on YouTube and Vimeo and PDFs, videos and audio files hosted on Archive.org. I really need to get this house in order.

Part of the reason that the number of blogs ballooned was a failed attempt at writing single-issue blogs. Yeah, that failed ‘cause I’m just not a single-issue kind’a writer. A little over two years ago, as I was contemplating my retirement from teaching, I started thinking that I needed to pull everything into at least one hosting service and made two websites: one for the writing and one for the media projects. First bump in the road was that I’d named the blog after my podcast, JBB’s Final Thoughts, but was having major difficulty keeping up any kind of podcasting schedule, so I had to go through the hassle of renaming the account and everything under my main domain name, JoeBustillos.com. I bought an expensive professional modular theme, DIVI from Elegant Themes, that really opened up how I could organize things, mainly because I was trying to find a way to archive my academic portfolio, especially highlighting all of the writing I’d done for my various classes over the years. That project took a year to complete, even though there are more than a few gaps and some cases where I used PDFs instead of converting the work to HTML. So, it’s “complete” for now.¹

The next project was getting my media portfolio organized. I’ve already written about this, but I found that I couldn’t create the kind of portfolio on my blogs so I switched over to the image platforms for that. Flickr worked for a bit, but then because I was posting hundreds of images for whatever event I was shooting, the load times really slowed to an unbearable crawl. And Flickr was never set up to combine images and text in a way that I was hoping for (like in a magazine). So I switched over to SmugMug, which was a more professional hosting service. And all seemed well and good until my introductory subscription expired and the $75 a year fee jumped to over $200 a year. Ugh. I switched back to a “basic” account and lost all the blog/magazine features and was back to square one with a fast website to post images, but no text. So I experimented with just hosting everything on my WordPress blog. I then realized, after finishing the academic portfolio project that I didn’t need to separate my writing from my media blogs and could have them on one server. That was a bright spot in the journey. Then I noticed that my WordPress hosting bill exploded from $65 the first year to $180 the next year and that this year’s bill was $348. Well, shit.

Turns out that “unlimited storage” meant 10GB for the $65 and 20GB for $180 and anything over 20GB was $348 a year. Dammit. I discovered this as I was dealing with trying to figure out my retirement budget and this was heading totally in the wrong direction. Fortunately I found a WordPress plugin, Photonic Gallery, that would let me host my images (and videos) on my fast SmugMug site, but embed them into my WordPress posts to create the kind of magazine images and text story telling that I wanted. So I worked like crazy to whittled down the images that I had on my WordPress site to less than 20GBs. But talking to a customer service person made me think twice about this whole thing. I had gotten well below the 20GB limit, but she said that I would have to migrate my site to qualify for a downgrade in price. That didn’t sit right with me, knowing that server space is just a number and that they should be able to just go to the database record for my account and check the box that says “under 20GB storage” without having to move any bits to another server or folder or whatever.

So, the most recent experiment was to see if I can get all of this done on my old WordPress.com site, that was way to slow before, but maybe it can work if I upgrade to a business account (which is still way cheaper than $350 a year!). They had a 30% discount on accounts, so I did the upgrade and last Friday put in the request to migrate my site from the third party server to WordPress.com. I panicked over the weekend that there might be posts on the old WordPress.com site that might not have gotten copied to the third party site and would be wiped out by the migration, so I spent the last five days slaving over the sites, making sure that every damn post was copied and ready to go. Any day now the WordPress.com site should look like the third party site. They said that it’d take two or three business days to do the work (which should have been today…). I’ll give them until Friday before barking up the chain of command. I hate waiting.

At the moment it looks like WordPress.com professional level (which is needed for the custom theme and plug-ins that I’m using) is costing $240 per year and my image hosting is $82 per year for a total of $322 per year to host my stuff online. Add to that the yearly cost of $288 for my various domain names (which I am in the process of cutting down to a much smaller collection, only keeping my name and potential book titles). Total expense for my online activities is $610 per year. Ugh. I really should make a much bigger effort to monetize some of this shit.

But the thought that really gets me going is that after all of this effort, once I’m gone and no one is forking out $610 a year (or whatever price things go up to), that it’ll all just disappear as if it never even existed. Decades of writing and thousands of hours of creating just gone with no means of recovery. So, while I try to gather all of my various projects into one simple point of entry I’m thinking about how I might ensure some level of survival after I’m gone.

I mean, going back to when I first started using computers to record my thoughts and musings and especially once things started to get all connected, the idea was that everything should be just one click away. That was the dream of hypertext and having a virtual library. And I don’t know that anyone should have to read through all the clueless shit I wrote as a teenager, especially during my first years at college, but I would like for all those words to outlive me somehow.

The basic problem is that I haven’t limited myself to just text, but often used images and video and audio in my work and that doesn’t easily translate to printed copies or some universal forms of archiving like PDFs. I could create a backup server on one of my own devices, but that’s just as likely to end up either in the trash heap or mindlessly written over like an old home VCR tape after I’m gone. And the digital world is hardly known for anything permanent or persistent. This is a problem that I need to figure out: what happens to my blogs after I’m gong?

P.S., Today I got an email from a third-party WordPress hosting service touting fast low-cost reliable connections. This is what I found when I checked their prices:

That would be $420 a year with only 15GB storage. Ummm, I think not. And this is the price of their most inexpensive plan. Their highest plan is an eye-watering $1640 a month or $19,680 a year (with a whopping 200GB thrown in!). Ack. I need to find a better way to preserve my work.

Tags: after I am gone, blogging, blogging history, web-hosting woes, WordPress