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Thinking of moving

/ Re-Farmer / 26 Comments

No, I don’t mean moving off the farm. For all the issues we’re having, I hope to live here for many more years!

No, I mean this blog.

This blog is a very photo heavy blog. Early on, we ran out of media storage with the free WP account, so we forked over the dollars to pay for an upgraded account, with our domain name, that gave us 13gigs of storage.

Which did tide us over for a while, but we are at 98.9% full right now.

Some things, I’ve been posting on Instagram and embedding here. Which doesn’t always works, and sometimes requires people to click through to Instagram to see the images, and I think you need to have an account to see anything there. There are some things, however, that I won’t post on The Re-Farmer Instagram account – like our stock up shopping photos. I also upload photos to Word Press using my phone only, because it automatically compresses the images into a smaller file. Something it does not seem to do when I upload using my computer. Even images I’ve resized significantly are larger files than ones I upload from my phone.

A while back, I started going through old posts to try and free up storage space. I got rid of a lot of “photos of the day” and “critter of the day” posts that basically had a photo and little else. With others where the photos were relevant to the post, I checked and, if the files were full size, I would remove the original image, resize it, and repost it.

It was enough to tide us over for a while longer but it is incredibly tedious and time heavy to do it, and I don’t even know if I managed to get all the posts I could. I’ve been making pretty much daily posts – sometimes several a day – for years, so there is a lot to go through. I have to first open a post and check the images separately. If it’s a full size image, I then have to find it in the media storage area. Which you’d think would be easy, since I could just copy and past the file name into the search field, but it turns out that WP changes the file names somehow, adding _ in spots within the file name, for example. So I would have to figure out how to find the image using parts of the file name, instead. Once I found an image that I wanted to keep, I would then resize it, upload the new file, input the new image file into the old post, then delete the original, large file. Or, if it was a photo only post, I would simply find and delete the old image file, and then the original post.

There’s only so much of that I can do, before there’s nothing left to change, and it’s not saving enough storage space to be worth it anymore. I hate making posts without at least some sort of image in it (like this one!). Most of my posts are about things we are doing that I want to share. The whole point of this blog is to document what we are doing here.

So I’ve been trying to figure out alternatives. The plan I have with WP right now isn’t available anymore, so if I upgrade, there’s no going back. Their plans go from 6gb of storage space to 50gb of storage space, and the plan I have now gives me 13gb.

Upgrading, however, is to a business plan I don’t want or need, just to get some extra storage space. There is an option to buy storage space as an add on, but it would need to be paid for annually (though the prices lists are monthly), and the cost for 50gb is more than twice as the cost of the next plan up, which comes with the same amount of storage space. They’re basically charging more than a dollar a gig (Canadian $), whether you’re buying an extra 50, 100, 150 or more gb.

Which is ridiculous.

Alternatives include starting another free WP account and using it just for storage space and embedding the images into posts here. Which becomes a logistical nightmare (I already have trouble keeping track of my personal accounts and this blog’s accounts). I had opened a Flickr account and use that to store images to embed here, but they limit by the number of files, not storage space, so that didn’t take long to fill up. I haven’t found another place to store files that can be embedded here that I like.

Another alternative is to move to another blogging platform. Since I use a gmail account for this blog’s email, I would have access to a Blogger account already. As far as I know, I haven’t seen any limit on how many images can be stores on a free account, but for all its problems, I like the editing functions on WP better than Blogger.

I tested out Medium, but that isn’t so much a platform for blogging as a space for far left extremist hive minds.

I considered doing YouTube videos, instead, but 1) it takes a lot more time to edit and upload a video and 2) there are only so many things I would want to take video of, and I’m not the sort that can just talk into a camera. I prefer writing. Plus, I also would avoid anything that shows our faces. There are reasons this blog remains anonymous.

I ended up getting a personal Substack account some time ago, mostly because I wanted to follow other Substacks. I haven’t tried writing anything there, but I noticed that you can transfer entire blogs over fairly easily to the platform.

So here’s the thing.

This blog now has just over 900 subscribers, including email subscribers, after 7 years of blogging. I really don’t make any effort to promote this blog. Again, our need to remain anonymous prevents us from trying to create the next, great viral blog. 😄 WP does make it easy to follow other WP blogs – or at least it does, when it’s actually working.

I turned ads on in 2020 and only recently got enough ad revenue for an actual payout, and that amount doesn’t even cover the cost of the plan we’re on. Not that this blog can be used as an income generator (I cannot have an income, as it would negatively effect my husband’s disability payments), but it can be used to raise donations for the cats.

From what I’ve seen, Substack might be a good place to move to. For anyone already using it, can you tell me what the limits are for storage space on a free account? I can’t find any information for that at all. Of course, I’d have to pay to keep our domain name, but that shouldn’t be an issue.

Substack also has other options that seem to make it easier to collect donations for the kitties. Substack would take a cut, but since the account is otherwise free, that beats how much we’re paying per year for our WP plan. With WP, I’d have to upgrade plans to be able to use a donation widget, and we just can’t afford that. I have a Ko-fi account, but have never been able to get anything more than a donation button to work here, and I keep forgetting to post updates there.

If I do move to Substack, and you subscribe to this blog, would you follow us over?

For those using Substack now, how to you find it? How would you compare the two platforms?

Any and all feedback would be greatly appreciated!

The Re-Farmer

Stages of sun

/ Re-Farmer / 2 Comments

I recently harvested the two biggest heads of sunflower seeds that were done blooming. They are now hanging in the basement to dry, where the birds can’t get at them.

As for the rest of them, we’ve got seed heads at all stages! Not all will have time to mature before the growing season ends, but we should still have a decent number of them to harvest and dry for the winter.

Click on the images to see larger sizes, though they are all 25% of the original size.

That one mutant sunflower, with all the extra seed heads developing, is one to keep an eye on! We might actually get a couple of seed heads mature enough to harvest before the end of the growing season.

While going through some of the photos I took with one of my daughters, she was suggesting I make some available for sale, in various forms. We’re still trying to come up with ways to be able to raise funds for things like a new roof, when I cannot get a job (for the new folks following this blog; as we are living on my husband’s health insurance disability payments, anything I earn would be deducted from his payments. If I were to earn more than his payments, he would lose his plan, which means no more coverage for his prescriptions). I was considering offering things up as fundraisers: all proceeds go towards replacing the roof, or getting yard cats fixed, or building a wheelchair ramp, etc.

So I’m putting the idea out there. If I were to, say, make photos available on, say, Redbubble, as prints, mugs, t-shirts, etc., would this interest you? I’ve had it suggested to put a donation button up, but I don’t like to ask for something for nothing. Other people use sites like Patreon, where there are rewards for different tiers. Of course, there are always affiliate links, like with Amazon, where the site would earn a commission. All proceeds would go to specific things, such as a new roof (long term goal) or getting yard cats spayed and neutered (short term goal) or building a wheelchair ramp (mid term goal), etc. It would have to be fundraising for a specific project, not an income for us. We would have to be very careful about that.

What do you think? Is it worth giving it a go?

The Re-Farmer