On July 28 this blog turned 16 years old, with 5,994 posts. I was SO CLOSE to reaching 6,000 at the blogiversary date that I’d made a concerted effort to coincide the two milestones. Wouldn’t that be great? I told myself. But sleep is also great, and sleep won.

That said, much sleep was sacrificed over the 16 years of this blog’s existence. It took me two weeks from the blogiversary, but I finally reached 6,000 with this post!

Milestones in Portugal

It took me nearly nine years to write 4,000 posts, and I happened to be in Portugal for that milestone, on my 39th birthday trip to a new country.

1,000 posts and three years later, I’d moved to the birthday country.

At the 6,000 mark, I’m two years with the second hosting company and have gone through umpteen template changes. I forget just how many templates until it’s necessary to dig into the Wayback Machine archive to see what it looked like. It’s the blogging equivalent of looking at old pictures and just as cringe-inducing, because there are “fashion moments” in the technology world, too. I archived my old Geocities page circa 2001 offline, and it’s nothing short of atrocious!

The Geeky Stuff

(It’s very geeky from here!)

You can see by the numbers that this past year has seen a reduction of posts equal to the previous year. Thanks in large part to time-consuming website maintenance and feeding the ever-hungry social media monster, which is part of the reason why fresh content arrives more slowly here these days. I’m always having to choose between fixing old posts or making new ones; both gobble up time. Deleting plugins that break the site or by developers who no longer update them can make old posts or the whole template look awful sometimes, which means either large-scale reformatting or ditching the template altogether and finding a new one. Trying to find a Photo-based template that doesn’t require uploads to the media gallery has been an ongoing mission in the life of this blog.

Isn’t blogging exciting?

The downside of reaching 6,000 posts is that the databases are growing ever-larger and more Server-intensive. I’m still at the top tier of shared hosting, and constantly monitoring the server usage so I’m not forced to host the site on a dedicated server.

The media library now has around 6,600 files and I’m trying to whittle that down. It doesn’t sound like much for a 16-year old blog, but for 13 of those years the photos have been hosted elsewhere. Images from 2002-2005 are still hosted on Blogger, from the original website, and most of the rest are embedded via code from my Flickr account, from 2005-2014 and 2017 until now. I wanted them on a separate server, partly for archival reasons and partly to reduce the load on my website’s server.

In 2014 I decided to switch to uploading images versus relying on Flickr, because I was concerned that Flickr would collapse under Yahoo and I would lose more than 10 years of images here. (I have nearly 50,000 pictures in Flickr.) The risk was always present, but I put my bet on there being enough users and developers with access to the Flickr API to build a way to fetch the images if/when necessary.

Wishful thinking? Maybe, but when I imported this website to WordPress in December 2005 and didn’t know anything about coding, I had to find a way to import 1,500 comments from Haloscan (because my blog is older than the commenting feature in Blogger), then merge them with the associated Blogger posts into WordPress. If this sounds daunting to you in 2018, let me tell you it was daunting to ME in 2005… and all this was happening while I was caring for a dying spouse. If I could do that (and sometimes I do wonder how I did that), I could certainly handle this.

Last year, while I was battling the bots and spiders that were pummelling this website (spoken like a true 21st century webmaster), I was searching for ways to try and stay within the hosting requirements of a shared server.

The reality is, this site will always be image-heavy.

At the rate I was accumulating image files on the server, I’d reach the limits of shared hosting in no time. I decided a return to using Flickr code for images was necessary to avoid turning to advertising to offset the costs of a dedicated server. (Currently, the only advertising here is on certain mobile devices but otherwise you wouldn’t notice.) I don’t use affiliates or accept sponsored posts, either, I want to keep this blog ad-free.

For this reason I’ve been — painstakingly — switching back to Flickr code for pictures. And it is painstaking! But it’s the most cost-effective option, since my Flickr account is peanuts (a low annual rate that’s been grandfathered for years and not available to new users).

Some good news came earlier this year: Flickr was acquired from Yahoo. It was bought by SmugMug, a company I have never particularly liked, but I remain positive that Flickr is in better hands than it was with Yahoo and will stick around for a while yet.

16 Favourite Photos of the Past Blog Year

To commemorate 16 years of pulling out my hair from technology frustration and still having lots left over, I’m going to randomly choose my 16 favourite photos from July 29, 2017-July 28, 2018. (This is harder than it sounds, there are 2,500+ images to choose from!)

Update: I’m clearly attached to many of my photos, I only got through to the end of 2017; these 16 are all from August to December. I’m going to stop while I’m ahead… 

In chronological order:

Cheers to surviving 16 years, Blog!

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