Time Has Not Been Good To My Blogger Blog
For me, pictures are worth a thousand words and today it's meaning has never been clearer when I see the blank place-keepers where my hard work used to be.
Through the years a few things happened that made my old Blogger blogs a nightmare to behold:
- changing code
- discontinued software
- changing platforms
- accidental deletion for space
- greed
I used Windows Live Writer for everything it was versatile, by Microsoft, and could be used for Blogger blogs. I connected it to Bekkie In Wonderland which allowed me to write my posts in an environment that looked like a preview of BIW so before publishing a post I knew how it would look.
Any Blogger blog could be connected in the same way and Windows Live Writer was everything Blogger's word processor should have been. (Making a note here that Blogger's word processor is still the same to this day with no improvements!) I used Windows Live Writer for all of my Blogger sites.
Even with Live Spaces discontinued Windows Live Writer was around for decades! As a word processor, it was one of the first to give you coding control using (the then new,) HTML code. It gave you total control over the size of images letting you drag whatever size you wished. That and other little things made it a great word processor.
As time went on it started to become obsolete as I started to see grumblings from Microsoft about pulling support. One day it didn't look like my website anymore when I wrote new posts and a year or so later it was pulled. Actually, it quit working (I was that hard-core.)
In the meantime, I found a site called Photobucket and not only could I store unlimited images for free I could do so like an image library. I could store animated GIF files (then new) and get the codes to post them anywhere including my blogs.
I tried to look at my account to see how long I've had it but can't find anything. It's a very old account maybe started in the 80's? The amount of ads around and on top of my images is bad and it takes forever to load. It wasn't always like this but as the years went on the ads grew.
I used to pay for Photobucket yearly. I did this for 2 years (I don't remember how much) it was a long time ago. I stopped paying and more years went by. My account was very buggy to use taking up precious time but it was easy and I used it for all of my sites.
Losing Windows Live Writer was bad because the HTML was a little different so switching to Blogger's processor gave me problems. Some of the posts were a different font, spaced wrong, etc. and it just made them look bad. I had to do a lot of work and delete a lot of work just to keep my content. It was terrible and time-consuming redoing old posts.
Just a year or so ago, I noticed the majority of the images on my websites were pulled along with a message from Photobucket telling me they were now charging for hosting. It was then I realized how much I had relied on Photobucket, a free service, and it was devastating. Nothing was for free anymore.
No way was I paying them again and now I could write my own code. I had to rework so many of my websites I gave up, deleting 3 of my older Blogger sites.
My WordPress blogs weren't as bad because I was already writing my own code on them. They use an easier HTML code than Blogger does meaning transferring one post in HTML from Blogger to WordPress doesn't work smoothly. So what else is new? Lol!
After deciding to keep Bekkie In Wonderland (my oldest blog) and already doing all the work to keep the posts I did keep I ran out of space on my Google Drive. I knew I wasn't going to get away without paying this time it was just a matter of who to pay.
It took me forever to go through my Google Drive and delete Gigs of images. I was very careful but not careful enough because some of the storage wasn't old files like I thought. When I saw BIW was missing most of its images AGAIN my heart sank. I still have the images elsewhere but didn't remember those particular pictures were linked to BIW.
I couldn't delete enough images on my Google Drive so I had to pay for a year of storage and still lost all of that work on BIW, some of it (image replacement) had been done once already.
Exhausted I'm done for now. My posts are fine without the pictures although I'm very unhappy about it this time. I'm not sure what to do. Some posts are ok but BIW is pretty much wiped out. All of the contributing factors have helped but I made the final boo-boo that brought me to this point.
Sorry for the missing photos. If you blog, I know some of you had Photobucket and maybe Windows Live accounts (in the past) too. I feel for you! What have you done about your missing images?
There's no need to pay for hosting images in this day and age! You can do it on your blogs word processor. Just make what you want (using images, words, and links) under Compose, when finished, use the HTML button, copy and paste it into an HTML box from your website.
My newer posts are ok so please read around the missing images until I can get to them. New posts will be more important. Life outside of my websites hasn't been much easier recently everything is getting too expensive in my state of California.
