My Dilemma: To End This Blog?

I am facing a dilemma.  For the past eight years I’ve been using a free WordPress blogging platform, and I have written about 2,400 posts.  Each post included at least one visual component — photos I’ve taken of my artwork, my surroundings, and food I’ve prepared.  Most often I included several photos in a post.  And now I have reached WordPress’s media library storage limit.  I can no longer upload photos to this blog unless I pay for extra storage.

I ran out of image storage space at the tail of of April’s Daily Doodles blog posts.  In order to finish out the month, I deleted some old photos from my WordPress media library.  This resulted in those photos disappearing from my archived blog posts.  And it was not even a one-to-one correspondence.  In order to upload just one new photo, I had to delete about twenty old photos.  I’ve decided that even though nobody will miss the old photos, I do not want to create holes in my old, archived blog posts.

I don’t want to pay WordPress a monthly fee for “premium” storage.  My blog is not a for-profit endeavor, and even though the fee is nominal, I don’t want extra expenses right now.  I know that I have no reason to expect WordPress or any other provider to give me an outlet for free.  But if I had to pay to blog, I probably wouldn’t do it.  I do appreciate WordPress immensely, and I’m grateful to have my blog with them.

So I am contemplating what I should do.

One option would be for me to quitting blogging entirely — I certainly have enough to keep me busy and engaged and creative without writing blog posts.  But I do appreciate having a blog platform for several reasons:

• It’s a great way to share what’s going on in my life with my far-flung siblings and friends and acquaintances.  I have no interest in being on Facebook, and my blog is one way people can check in with me if they care to.  I have siblings in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Oregon, Colorado, and Israel.  We’ve all pretty much stopped corresponding with letters or even email.
• I’ve made a few lovely friends as a result of my blog.
• I’ve come to LOVE the blog as a useful tool for keeping my photos and trip notes and recipes and art explorations organized.  The “search” box on my blog works as an indexing tool.  For example, if I want to find a recipe that uses rhubarb, I can type “rhubarb” in my search box and then scroll through my posts about recipes I’ve made in the past.  If someone asks me about a place I’ve been, like my favorite Ebey’s Landing hike, I can search for old posts and email him or her the link.  If I want to paint an iris, I can search through my photos of irises in my old blog posts.  This is VERY handy!
• I want to continue to document certain things in my life: my art work — individual paintings/drawings and multi-day projects; my travel journals; favorite books, foods and daily experiences.  My blog has become a documentary of my life.  I haven’t finished some of the projects I’ve started, like Armchair America (travel through books) and book covers of favorite books.
• It’s a good thing to have a reason to think about even one good, beautiful, interesting thing that happens in my day and that I think might be worthy of noting (and sharing).  My blog is a record of what I pay attention to and reflect upon.

One solution would be for me to resize all of my photos for posting to a lower resolution.  This probably wouldn’t be a noticeable decrease in quality to viewers.  But that would mean researching and learning about image optimization, putting all of my photos through this type of editing app before uploading to the blog.   I hate this kind of technical detail, and I simply don’t want to devote time to figuring this out and then keeping it up on an ongoing basis.

Another solution might be to end this blog and start a new one.

Once I figure out what to do, I’ll let you know.  I am so grateful that you’ve taken time to follow and/or read my posts.  I appreciate your interest and attention.

 

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