Blog

Short blog posts, journal entries, and random thoughts. Topics include a mix of personal and the world at large. 

Happy 2nd anni to me and Squarespace

Yesterday I checked my Mint account to see how much money I don't have, and found out Squarespace have charged the annual fee for this hosting this very site. Because I am a super pro and awesome, I pay for the business tier which costs $216 dollars per year. I don’t exactly sell anything on here, but back when I signed up for Squarespace, the personal tier did not include unlimited pages and galleries, so I was forced to go with business. Maybe I should call and downgrade now that the base tier offers unlimited content hosting as well.

I’m quite happy and proud it’s already been two years since I’ve migrated over to Squarespace, from the combination of tumblr plus Flickr. I think Flickr is still going relatively strongly due to its legion of legacy users stemming from way back when, but tumblr, last I’ve heard, is not doing so well: parent company Verizon have sold it to the owners of Wordpress for essentially peanuts. I’m rather glad I jumped off that sinking ship, though I do still miss the community interactions that tumblr provided; Squarespace is a fairly standard website hosting service, and there isn’t any of the intensive linkage between “sites” like tumblr offers.

Good times, I would say. Instagram killed the tumblr star.

It was slightly out of character for me to switch from a free service to a paying one (and Squarespace wasn’t exactly the cheapest service, either), but I think two years ago I had a strong desire to bring the two separate threads under one slick and modern package. Tumblr wasn’t the best at showing photos at their maximum quality, so hosting full-size photos on Flickr was necessary. The linking back and forth was a bit tiring for the person who had to set it up: me, so to concentrate more on the actual content, the incentive to bring the wordy website and photo repository together at the same spot was strong.

Of course, Squarespace made it super easy to pick a template and get going, though the initial setup process (idiosyncratic to me) was a huge chore because I had to manually add everything from my tumblr and Flickr account. Words, photos, tags, metadata: all had to be entered for each individual content, dating way back to 2011. Tedious, to say the least.

Money is well spent if there’s utility to the thing you bought, so on that vein I shall continue to constantly push out new stuff on here to justify the $18 per month hosting cost. Here’s to many more ramblings, photographs, and stories.

On weekends we go grocery shopping.

Good riddance, Flickr

How was your weekend? Hope it was splendid. I spend the two days entirely in from of the iMac. 

Because I finally got off my ass and finished porting over the rest of the data from my old tumblr website and flickr page over to this Squarespace site. Transferring photos is the easy part - I did it a month ago; the rest of the metadata such as titles and captions I had to do manually. It's as dreadfully boring and tedious as it sounds. 

A hearty good riddance to flickr. It used to be wonderful back in the day before Yahoo bought its parent company. These days it's one of the company's many neglected children: no substantial updates of any sort in the past years. Photographs still get compressed to hell, the layout is in desperate need of redesign, and its geolocation maps are utterly useless (Apple Maps at its troubled infancy was better). Surely the only reason me and others have continued to use flickr despite its glaring shortcomings is friction: it takes considerable effort to move hosts.

And now that Yahoo has sold to Verizon, flickr users shouldn't hold their breath for updates. It's a platform way beyond its prime. Instead of a flickr landing page, photo hobbyist and professionals should have their own website: hosts like Squarespace or Smugmug make it too easy, and quite affordable. 

With my flickr page is shuttered, I only have this website, instagram account, and twitter page to manage in regards to online presence. It should be much streamlined and focused going forward. I haven't been on Facebook in years, though I still have a LinkedIN account that for all intents and purposes is there because every other working professional has one. Not sure why exactly, but here we are.