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It's the end of a blogger era. After six years of blogging on The Not So Lonely Planet (www.closetblonde.blogspot.com), I was finally in the process of uploading my Salar de Uyuni photos when blogger tells me that I've exceeded my photo storage limit.
What the....?
I never even knew such a thing existed, and there it was, telling me I have a 1GB limit. Sure, I could have coughed up the annual fee for increased storage space, but I've been wanting to overhaul my blog for sometime. I've been wanting to customise the template, and I also think that I've out grown of my "Closet Blonde" crown title, (although I have been doing some pretty air headed things as of late - think: getting into a car that I thought was mine, and crazier still was that my key actually opened their car door. Who would have thought?)
Anyway, so it was time to move on. But where to? I finally decided on Tumblr, as they have no photo storage limit, which is a rarity for a free blogging site. Then, due to my non-existent skills in web design, I spent another week looking for a template that I was "relatively" happy with. On week two, I uploaded the template and then realised that I didn't have a background. Then I had to find a background, and as I wasn't quite happy with it,
I spent another week editing in Photoshop. Then, not being 100% happy with the template, I had to learn html to change margins, borders, font sizes and colours etc. Next, I had to learn how to add an About Page. It was only after all of this that I realised that Tumblr is not so great with their formatting options.... I somehow figured out the html to place an image on the right hand side and have the text wrap around the image on the left. What had me stumped was trying to create space - a "buffer" between the text and the image. I couldn't figure out - I spent about two weeks attempting to write the html code for this, and nothing seemed to work. I got a friend to have a look at it and he couldn't figure it out.
"Why don't you use Adobe In-Design and then upload your blog post as a pdf?" he says.
I think this isn't such a bad idea and then spend the next week downloadng the software (and then having to try and figure out how to use it).
I have lunch with C., (freshly back from her week stint in Chicago,) two weeks later and mention the Adobe In-Design idea to her.
"That is the most terrible idea," she says. "If you upload it as a pdf, it means everytime somebody wants to look at your blog, they have to download all the data onto their computer. Your blog is better in html form as they can just view the image without downloading all that data."
"Oh," I say.
"You need to use an image hosting webiste to link your photo to the blog so that you don't run out of space on the actual blog," she says.
The icing on the cake is when I ring S. and get him to look at my semi completed Tumblr blog.
"Why is your background repeating itself?" he says.
"Uh? What do you mean?" I frown and then upload my blog on my laptop. "It looks fine to me."
"It's repeating itself and it looks distorted." he says. "I see the distortion because my computer screen is larger than yours. The image isn't large enough, so it's repeating itself to try and cover the entire screen."
"Really?!!" I say. I am extremely dismayed. "What do I do?"
I don't get a very constructive answer from him.
So after....what, eight weeks? It's back to the drawining board - AGAIN. New blog, new template, trying to puzzle through finding an appropriate imge hosting website, so FML.
And ironically, I've gone a full circle and come back to blogger.
**The beautiful photo is courtesy of photographer Rocky Nolan, (http://www.flickr.com/photos/fadedfilmstrips/3703031119/in/photostream/)**
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