I just got my bill for the year’s WordPress blog hosting. This happens every time. You’d think I’d be impervious to seeing the amount. Alas, as usual, the amount has inspired me to question whether I should continue paying this much money for blog hosting for a blog that is largely “invisible” to the rest of the Internet.1 I guess this is just something that I do every two years, when the hosting bill shows up in my email inbox. 

At the moment, most of my writing energy has been going into working on the journal project, moving everything I’ve written since 1985 into a printable book or e-book form. I post a couple paragraphs two to three times a week, mostly movie reviews and LEGO builds on the WordPress website. My daily thoughts/observations are primarily recorded in my personal DayOne app (which I’m planning on copying into the journal project) with some of these musings spilling out onto my FB page. In the journal project, I just “finished” working on entries from 1999, noting that the number of entries have substantially dropped for both 1998 and 1999, probably because I was in the process of switching writing platforms and things seem to have gotten lost in the process. So, while this thing of me reacting poorly to the cost of hosting my blog clearly happens all of the time, I am growing more sensitive to changing the process and how this will work out in the long run (like when I’m not around to pay over $200 a year for the pleasure)…

To be honest, I’d love it if the blog were much more popular, but I do it because I like the way it looks and allows me to write these kinds of reflective posts one day, then write a review of a movie the next and then post a video of my latest LEGO adventure. And I pay the amount that I do because for my blog to look the way I like requires an array of plug-ins, or bits of code that makes it possible for me to do things like embedding image catalogues that I have stored on a separate image website, or add footnotes to different posts (like this one), or even the blog theme I’m using requires various plugins to work. I have tried, several times, to make do with free or “low cost” hosting plans and they just don’t get it done for me. 

I know a few publish authors who go the free WordPress website route, or SubStack or Medium hosting, and they seem no worse for wear. I guess I’m just one of those weirdos who doesn’t fit into any one slot or service. But maybe I’m thinking about this incorrectly. Previously, when I attempted the “free” route, I’d break my blog up into various themes or topics, because that’s I was told you’re supposed to do. No one going to a blog about NASA wants to read or hear about what’s wrong with public education in Florida, or someone wanting to learn about education in Florida probably won’t be interested in my travel-log from my 41-day cross-country road trip from Las Vegas to Florida to DC to NYC to Chicago to Madison to Minneapolis to Oklahoma City and back to ‘Vegas in 2017.  But the “problem” isn’t necessarily that they land on a post they’re interested in but the next post is something that they don’t care about. For the visitor, the problem is finding your post at all, given the millions of other posts out there on the same topic. But for me, the writer/photographer/nerd, maybe the issue is that barrier between hosting words with an occasional image versus hosting stories told through images and videos. As I was working through this post, I revisited my SmugMug site, where I currently host the majority of my images and some of my videos and the only reason I didn’t just move my media website there was because I like magazine style pages where one gets a big image and then a paragraph or two of text and then a gallery of six images and another paragraph and then a video or another gallery of images and then a concluding paragraph. To do that on SmugMug would run more over $250 a year, whereas just hosting “unlimited” images and videos was $85 when I started this (currently $97 a year). 

The thing is, when I do a photoshoot at a concert, or extended travels, I like posting a lot of images and let the artist or viewer enjoy the images in the highest resolution as possible. But lately I’ve been finding that things are “easier” to manage if I take the images and make a short tour video with the images and then host the video on YouTube and post them on my blog… I’ve been doing that with the LEGO builds lately. Folks don’t tend to care to leaf through 50 images or more from a concert, or rocket launch or LEGO build. Using videos instead of image galleries with text might satisfy my need to add commentary to my images, or use images to communicate my story. I’ve already switched to hosting my PDFs (for my academic posts) on Archive.org. I could switch there for image hosting too, though I don’t think they offer a means of creating a “gallery” of images, without adding each image to the blog individually. Hmmm. There’s much here to think about. 

I think I’ve accidentally talked myself into converting all of my image galleries into short videos, but keeping some galleries posted for the subjects of the images to check and use on their own. Converting years of images to videos, even short videos is a rather large project to consider. Damn. This is not making anything “easier,” or even less expensive. Damn. 

One other thought that came up, is that because I am going through everything written by yours truly and organizing the work into a journal/book, maybe I can use that organized text to create the searchable/linkable body of work that I’m imagining. Besides having a hard copy of everything (print version) there could be linkable/searchable PDF versions that allow for a linear version of my work but also allow for me to bundle similarly themed subjects or topics, like when I wrote a commentary on the Gospel of Matthew over the course of several years. In the linear journal a bookmark/link could be placed showing when that commentary post was made, but the commentary post itself is collected together with all of the other Gospel of Matthew commentary posts… I could do the same with with all of the essays and articles I wrote during my various college degree programs. Have the work gathered by degree program and course but have a marker/link in the linear journal (though the actual date of pre-computer work will have to be of a range and not exact). This is turning into an interesting proposition. 

Well, it looks like I certainly have a lot of work to do (including exploring different ways that my writing app, Scrivener, exports the text). Ok, I’ve paid the blog hosting bill for the next two years. Now, back to work. JBB 

Sources:

Tags: blogging, blogging issues, journal writing, scrivener, wordpress.com

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FOOTNOTES:
  1. Although one of my Portland neighbors seems to have found my website and is duly impressed… assuming that she found the WordPress site and not my FB page… ack.[↩]