Websites

Personal websites are dangerous things, just ask me, I have 3 of them. Sure they start out simple enough, maybe just a place to put some photos to share with family and friends, but before you know it those few dozen photos have started breeding when you're not looking and turned into a horde of  thousands.  My first website dates back to 2001 when I was selling on eBay and wanted a place to host my own photos. I not only uploaded photos to use on eBay, but also used it for hosting pics that I posted on the many forums I hung out at, for avatars, for songs I was sharing with a friend, for short movies I took, for a large database of Great Dane pedigrees complete with photos, for things I didn't want to lose if the computer crashed, and the list goes on and on.

The second website was started a few years later for my second eBay selling ID. It eventually became the place to put all my motorcycle related things -  rally and grand tour photos, strange places and interesting things I saw on my journeys, ride reports. I also used both websites at various times to back-up my desktop computer.

I started blogging very recently. After a very short time I changed the name of the blog. Then my web host sent an email saying they were having a heck of a sale on new domains and hosting packages, so now I've gotten a new domain and will eventually migrate this Blogger blog to a self-hosted Wordpress blog. Oh joy! I thought I'd just move everything off the two original websites and close them down, it would save a couple hundred dollars a year in hosting fees. Turns out that's easier said than done. There are literally thousands (if not 10's of thousands) of items in hundreds of directories on the two sites. Most have terrible names that give no clue as to what they actually are, so I'm downloading everything one directory at a time just to see what they are. Oh look, there's a picture of my grandson the day he was born! Or, why in the world did I think that joke was funny?  Or, awwwww, puppies! Or, who are those people in that photo, and where was it taken? Who took it??  lol

Because I used the websites as a way to back-up the desktop before I reformatted it, some of the photos and other files exist nowhere else, therefore I don't want to just delete them without seeing what they are. This whole download thing is made even more problematic by the fact that I have satellite internet with a low bandwidth limit. I can do a few directories a day and then I'm at my limit. Hopefully by the time the hosting comes up for renewal in a few months I will have transferred everything to my laptop and saved the things I really want to keep to an external drive or to the new website. At that point I get to try and learn how to run a self-hosted Wordpress blog. Seems the older I get the harder it is for me to get new information to stick in my brain.

In the meantime, here's some of the wildflowers growing along the driveway taken a few days ago, they're actually hosted on the new website.  lol