Friday 30 June 2017

when blogging bites back

You might notice that like 80 percent of all of my posts are missing.

Yeah.

It kind of sucks.

Basically, Photobucket (absolutely naming and shaming) decided to update its terms of service so that you can't use it as a photo-hosting service without paying for it. And I would be okay with this, totally, if I'd been given some forewarning and a chance to either switch service, or pay for Photobucket if it wasn't too expensive.

The issue is that, if there was a warning e-mail, I didn't get it. This morning when I went to post a book review, I was greeted with the horror of all of my photos being gone, or more so replaced with a really stark image screaming "PLEASE UPDATE YOUR ACCOUNT TO ENABLE THIRD PARTY HOSTING". Embarrassing much?

I mean, maybe Photobucket was never the right choice for this blog. The website has always been painfully slow on my ageing devices. I should have known they'd only allow their service for free for so long, but still, it's a pain. A pain that will take a few hours to fix.

There's one positive thing about this whole mess though (and it's not that I can't remember the order of photos in posts. I'm sincerely sorry if they're disconcertingly different). That positive thing is it is making me reflect on every post I've kept up. I've deleted a few boring ones over the years that I have no loving feelings towards, but I never really considered the value of most. This has given me an opportunity to delete the extremely lazy ones, where there are a couple of old photos with the words "s0rrY 4 n0t BLogG1ng" but a little bit more eloquent.

I guess I want to make this place more beautiful, and more me. You've probably noticed that I essentially don't put up pictures of myself. Just the odd vague side view. I suppose I'm still kind of scared to do that, but I would like to try to inject much more of myself, much more personality into this space.

I realise now how much I value this website. And now I want to make it even better, higher quality, more sincerity.

Until I get some old favourites up and running, there are a limited amount of posts live, but I hope you don't mind.

What's the biggest blogging disaster that's ever happened to you? This is most certainly mine. And yeah. I'm reusing an old photo- but it's so cool and the post I had it in was decidedly crap!

Anna x

14 comments

  1. That would suck so much, I feel for you. So far I haven't had any blogging disasters, but my computer did break down and it took me months to get the files back.

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  2. That sounds horrible, they should really have given you a forewarning about it. But on the bright side, there's some positives from what happened :) I relate with you about not putting much pictures of myself in the blog, but I'm also trying to get past that. No blogging disasters happened to me, which I am grateful for, aside from drafts which I've spent hours on getting deleted. Okay, so maybe that is a disaster, haha.

    yuki, solivagantic

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  3. Wow, that sounds very stressful indeed. It's funny how much we rely on technology nowadays.

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  4. That's the absolute worst! I'm used to blogger freaking out but not other websites. I'm glad you found an opportunity to clean out old posts though. I know what you mean about wanting to make your blog spick and speck. I love every detail tat goes into my blog; I love presenting as much as I do writing. :)

    I think the worst that's happened to me is when I spent a little over 2 hours on a detailed blog post about Blogger hacks and things that could make Blogger better. I saved it, opened the post again a few seconds later and you know what I found? An existing blog post. Everything I wrote in 2 hours was wiped away, with only the post title saved. Maybe a conspiracy...?

    Zu Hause is German for 'to home' isn't it? Or is it 'at home'? I'm trying to pick up German but it's a slow process!

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  5. Woah, I didn't know that Photobucket now requires you to pay for their services! It's pretty shady for them to suddenly change their services and host your images hostage for money... In a way, it helped you take a step and reviewed your blog a bit to see where you want to take it.

    Ages ago, my host suddenly closed and I had to buy a new domain and start over because I didn't have my files. I guess that's part of the reason why I decided to join the web hosting industry as a side project. I don't want anyone to fall into the same situation unfairly.

    https://exquisitely.me

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  6. That's very noble of you! It's very nice to know that there are real people behind businesses, with very honest concerns! Every cloud has a silver lining :) x

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  7. I agree, presenting a blog as you put it feels great! It's amazing to put your own touch on every aspect that you can. It's such a shame about that post! I'm sure that was very troubling at the time.

    "Zu" means all sorts of things, including to and at. In the context, you're right that it means "at home" :)

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  8. That's a great pity about the drafts, some of theses sites seem to have a mean mind of their own! thank you for commenting :)

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  9. Oh I once deleted ALL the pictures from my blog by accident and had to do the exact same thing you did. Turned out fine in the end though :)

    Stella xx
    https://onegirlblogger.blogspot.com/

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  10. Oh no I'm so sorry to hear about your photos! Ughh that's so annoying of them. You still have your photos on Photobucket though, but you just can't share them with third party hosting, right? Good luck moving forward! Hmm, luckily I haven't encountered any huge disasters yet, but I did lose my old comments when I switched platforms (which I've done twice). It was probably me though; I probably did something wrong -_-" -Audrey | Brunch at Audrey's

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  11. Oh noooo, this sounds like such a pain! It's pretty rotten of them not to give you any notice mind, and for a site that's been going for so long, it's a bit weird of them to be like 'oh you have to pay now.' Not cool at all! I hope it all gets sorted for you!

    Olivia - The Northernist x

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  12. I'm glad it all worked out. It's a bit of a pain though, for sure! x

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  13. Oops sorry for not seeing this sooner! Yes, it was quite a shock! And to upgrade ended up costing I think 400$ a year? So I definitely quit the site after that!

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  14. Yes, that's right! You can still keep your photobucket for I suppose 'personal use', but they kept emailing me to upgrade anyway, so as soon as I had them all downloaded, I just deleted the thing! Ah yeah, losing comments is a bit of a bummer. Thanks for your comment, and sorry for not seeing it sooner xx

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Thank you for your words x

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