Blog

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

Again!?

It’s not very nice to wake up to an email from Squarespace saying the price of a website subscription has, once again, gone up. This, after the company has already raised the pricing only last year. Inflation may have slowed to “normal”, but Squarespace certainly doesn’t think so! It might not be right now, but at some point I have to rethink whether or not it is worth the $200 per year just for the ability to say: I’ve got a website!

Is Tumblr still free? (Who owns it now anyways?) Maybe I should go back to blogging on that. It wouldn’t look as nice, but that extra $200 per year can easily cover a single trip to Costco. Hashtag browsing.

You ever look at your W2 during tax time, and wonder out loud where the heck did all your money go? You’ve made a certain amount of money this past calendar year, and yet your checking account can barely cover a month’s worth of bills.

All of these subscriptions we enjoy can add up to a large number, given a long enough timeline. $15 per month here and there may seem eminently affordable, but I would say those are the phantoms leeching away your monthly paycheck. For me, my subscriptions combined is easily $160 per month. While that can barely cover a single trip to Costco, imaging saving that amount every month. Do it for a long enough timeline…

That said, asceticism does not interest me. You got to spend your money on something, right? Though I think it’s important to periodically reevaluate whether or not something is worth the time and money. This website of mine remains worthy. But if prices keep going the way of these past two annual renewals, I’m going to have to think about it.

Aaand it's gone

I am scheduled to receive a $3,500 bonus check as negotiated by our union at work. And all of that money is heading straight back out. Most of it will go towards my BMW M2 Competition. The annual CA license fee is due soon, something like $700 dollars. The six months renewal on the car insurance is also coming right up. That’s another $1,000 out the door. And that’s if I’m lucky and the premiums don’t increase. I sure hope not too many people are wrecking their BMWs these days.

The M2 has scheduled maintenance in September, but thankfully that is still paid for by BMW. The second of three years of free maintenance. I’m going to enjoy that while it lasts because getting the car serviced at a dealership cannot be cheap. I’m still undecided if I will stick with BMW of San Francisco after the free servicing expires. An independent mechanic would be cheaper, but there are convenient loaner vehicles at a dealership. Something to think about next year.

So half of the bonus check goes towards the M2. Like I always say: if I weren’t a car enthusiast I would be far richer. Of course, Uncle Sam takes a chunk of that bonus money as well. The full $3,500 is symbolic only.

The yearly hosting fee for this Squarespace website is also due next month. The fee were raised back in February, so it’ll be my first time paying the new privilege of $252 for the business plan. Not exactly sure what I’m receiving in return for the price increase. I’m sure it’s just Squarespace trying to get more money because it simply can. Obviously I am going to continue paying up because this site of mine is very important to me. Even if there’s not a single visitor.

Fine, I'll do it myself

A few weeks back I wrote about how the archive page on this website - an index of all my writing - have been acting inconsistent and (sometimes) nonexistent. An inquiry to Squarespace support got me nowhere. Basically it’s a known quirk, and practically speaking it will not be fixed. Support said I have too much content for that indexing function. Mind you I pay over two hundred dollars a year to Squarespace to host this website! A paid product should not be broken on any of its functions.

Nevertheless, it was up to me to act. I can either switch to another website host, or switch to the newer 7.1 templates. Both options require an immense amount of work: I practically have to piece-meal transfer over the entire lot of my content. Doable, given a long enough timeframe, but not ideal given my other time commitments. I would need about two weeks of nothing else to concentrate on that sort of project.

It seems tedium is not to be avoided, however. The solution I arrived at is rather simple on paper: do my own indexing. No more relying on Squarespace’s module to fetch the content. Instead I shall manually construct the archive. By going to every piece I’ve ever written on here, copy the title and hyperlink, then paste them onto the page. With some 500 individual posts to copy and link, the process was going to be slow.

And it took the better part of last weekend to accomplish the transition. The archive page is finally looking how I want it to be. Like the carpenter who sands and paints the back of the cabinet, every little detail matters! Of course, for any new post I write henceforth, I have to manually add it to the index. Minor labor that’s worth trading for an archive page that will load properly each and every time.

Not acceptable, Squarespace

The “archive” page of this website, nested under the “Words” category is where I show a list of everything I’ve ever written thus far. A easily readable index for my entire back catalog of writing. Mainly for my own personal satisfaction, because let’s face it: who would be interested in reading something I wrote five years ago? Not even my mother, because she doesn’t understand English.

Anyways, I’ve noticed from time to time that the index block for this blog would disappear completely. For no reason at all. In the CMS it still shows the correct link to the page, but outwardly on the site it’s a whole blank of nothing. To get the content back, I would have to unlink the blog page to that index block and relink it again. A slight pain in the butt to do every few days.

So I finally got off my butt and wrote to Squarespace support. The response:

This issue shows up specifically on archive blocks using the "index" layout - essentially, if there's too much content for the block to render, it'll "crash" and not show up on the live site. To fix this, you could either change the layout by editing the archive block to be something other than "index", or you could break the content up into multiple archive blocks.

Basically, it’s a known bug, and there’s really no fix for it currently. Only workarounds. It’s rather disappointing that the index block can be defeated by a page with “too much content”. Keep in mind that Squarespace site hosting is something I pay for every year to the tune of over $200 dollars. This is an incredibly bad look for what is suppose to be a professional product. Many out there make their living from their Squarespace websites. I don’t, but I pay just like everybody else, and I expect a working product.

I wonder if there is a different host that has a working indexing function, and would allow me to transfer this site over easily…

Squarespace was down. Again

It is just me or is Squarespace a bit unreliable lately? I am currently typing this on Microsoft Word because the entirety of Squarespace is down, and I have no access to the main portal (I usually type these short blogs on the portal itself; the wordier stuff like the GT3 diaries are typed on Word before exporting). Needlessly to say, my website itself is currently unavailable, too.

It’s quite frustrating.

Not to say my personal website is of any real significance in the grand scheme of the Internet, but this is unacceptable, right? For a web hosting company to be down for any reason, much less at the frequency Squarespace has been experiencing trouble lately. Just a few weeks back, photo hosting was malfunctioning, preventing me from uploading pictures, which for my purposes is largely what my website is based on, so that situation is far from ideal.

I’m sure there are much larger and more important websites being hosted by Squarespace that can’t suffer to be offline for any period. I think the company needs to seriously reevaluate the stability of its platform if it wants to keep growing and sort of take a chunk of the marketplace dominated by Amazon S3. Remember when that suffered an outage back in 2017? Seemingly half the websites I frequent were inaccessible. That was the only time I could remember S3 being out significantly, and if Squarespace wants to play in that arena, the rate it’s been offline lately is not going cut it.

Small-time freelancers who are dependent on their Squarespace-hosted sites to make a living simply can’t afford to have any downtime. And it isn’t like Squarespace is some basic entry-level platform: we’re paying over $200 dollars per year for an account, and I think it’s only fair that we should have 100 percent uptime in return. These are prime content creating and earning hours of a workday, and not being able to access our websites is an intolerable hindrance.

Perhaps Squarespace should spend less money advertising 10% discounts with creators on YouTube (full disclosure: I did use one of the freely available coupon codes for my first year) and instead move some resources towards ensuring complete service uptime. As the cliché goes: I’m not mad, just disappointed.

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.

A year with Squarespace

Difficult to believe it’s already been a whole year since I’ve move to the Squarespace platform. It was also a surprise because when I went to check on my money accounts (I use Mint), a hefty charge of $215 showed up on one of the credit cards. That is indeed the yearly fee for the privilege of using this wonderful host sans any limitations.

Much like how the annual fee for Amazon Prime sneaks up on me every year, I can see why people of my generation much prefer these payments to be broken down monthly instead of annually. The emotional optics are simply easier to stomach than having to all of the sudden cough up a few hundred dollars. It’s especially jarring for people like myself who keep monthly budgets as tight as possible.

The new iPhone that costs over one thousand dollars? No it doesn’t! Split into 24 payments it’s only $56 dollars a month! An infinitely easier pill to swallow, isn’t it? That brand new BMW sedan isn’t really over $40,000 dollars; on a lease it’s only costs $300 a month!

For the less financially inclined it’s of course easy to fall into the “affordable” monthly payment trap and go way beyond proper spending limits. But for the financially savvy - which I think of myself as - sectioning a big monetary outlay into tiny bits can be an excellent strategy to maximize returns (however small they may be). I rather do a piecemeal plan and hoard as much cash as possible to at the very least earn interest in a savings account.

This is precisely why instead of the typical lump sum every 6 months, I pay my car insurance every month. I can do the bi-yearly plan no problem at all, but it’s more prudent to keep the leftover cash in an investment account to accrue some modicum of gain. Plus, it’s far easier for budgeting purposes.

Anyways, it’s been a good year, Squarespace. Please don’t raise your fees.