Friday, June 26, 2015

Doing my heart good...

I truly value the comments that have been coming in.  Understand that I do not want to stop the blog. I made the decision I did because 1) Google screws with my photos, and 2) Google began charging me for photo space.  That made the blogging something that was a source of irritation and frustration, rather than being a joy shared.

If anyone knows of another blog host where I could resume my blog or begin a new one, please email me or, if you don't have my email, leave a comment, to steer me there.

I guess my real issue is that I am done with Google Blogspot.

6 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi Ken, I had silently followed your blog since the beginning and look forward to each new post. Love the pictures and the naming of your RV and toad. My husband and I are star trek fan. We recently got our new 2014 Lazy Daze MB and value your opinions and comment on the yahoo forum. I plan to blog about our travel using either Blogger or Wordpress with private setting just for my own record and family. I hope you will find a way to resolve the photos issue and keep blogging, because you have the best photos of the couple dozen blogs that I follow and I really enjoy the images that you captured. Thanks for all the blogs you had posted. I usually link here from another blog "Life's little adventure".

Steven Crisp said...

Hi Ken,

I just found your blog, and find your photos to be amazing. Thanks for sharing. Photography and blogging are one of my interest areas as well, and I hope to start mine back up when we hit the road in February.

My comment is to ask about this Google policy you ran into. I also have a number of blogs on blogspot, and have never had to pay for them. So my questions are two, if I might:

(1) what was the issue from Google, and why were you impacted? Should I expect the same?

(2) how did you transition to your new site? Was it easy? Are there any kind of instructions should I find myself in a similar situation.

Thanks again for sharing all of those great photographs.

All the best,

Steve Crisp

Ken said...

Hi Steve, and thanks for the kind words. The Google issues were twofold and were partially misunderstood by me. Google would not publish a blog post, telling me I was out of space, but that I could buy more storage space.

I went back to some early posts and deleted some content and some posts that I thought were not important, and tried to do the post again. No change. I deleted more. I learned that Google counts ALL your content in the total, so I deleted all my videos on YouTube. No change. I called them and got no help. I deleted more. I called again, Finally, someone told me it was my email.

For well over 10 years, I have kept the stuff I wanted to keep on my computer, and deleted the rest. Unknown to me was that ALL of it still was kept on the Google server. I deleted all the old stuff and I had access to post once again. The problem came from my mail account. None of the posts, pics or videos that I had deleted were the problem. So, I was pretty irritated with Google for not being more clear about the issues.

The second issue was the photos. I had done some very carefully taken and processed photos at University Falls. Bars of light were slashing diagonally across the feathery mist at the falls. The contrast and exposure were critical to the shot, and when I posted them in my blog, Google automatically adjusted both to what some software thought was the "proper" processing. It ruined the shots.

That was the last straw for me.

As to transitioning, when I found Wordpress, I spent some time picking a form that I thought would fit my work. After that, it was a cinch. I found blogging on Wordpress to be simpler than blogging on Google. Basically, I created the account, selected a template, and began posting.

Ken

Steven Crisp said...

Good explanation Ken.

One more question. Were you able to easily (or at all) transfer over the content you already had on Blogspot to Wordpress, or did you just start anew?

Did you investigate if that was even possible? I ask only in case I decide to make a similar change.

And good to know about Google reprocessing the photos -- who would have thought that would happen? Unless it is just some conversion downgrade to a smaller size JPEG image?

Once again, your photos -- especially on this Wordpress site -- are quite the inspiration.

Thanks again for sharing.

Steve Crisp

Ken said...

Steve, I asked, and was told there was no way to automatically transfer content. I would have to re-create each post from scratch. So, I left a forwarding address here, and on Wordpress, left a tag tot make people back to the Google blog.

As to reprocessing, it was not just a moderation to a smaller size. They made the contrast less and the exposure more. It was VERY noticeable on those pics, but looking back, I can see other pics that were "tweaked".

To see it, I would go to a posted image, then open the original alongside the posted one. If the pic is midline, it was hard to see a difference, but if the photo was darker, which is sometimes a conscious choice, the changes were clear.

Ken

Steven Crisp said...

Thanks Ken.

That's unfortunate to hear -- both the changes they made to your photos, and the lack of anyway to transfer the content.

Although the latter is not really a surprise.

Thanks again for all of the info. It will be a help for me, and it appears I will need to put Wordpress on my to-do list.

All the best,

Steve Crisp