The Death of a Blog

I just recently made my first ever blog book.  It is beautiful and I am in love with it.  All 160 pages of it.  I probably would have made it longer even though it would have cost a small fortune, but 160 was Picaboo's page limit.  So, I have a book that covers my blog through 2010.  I guess I'll have to start working on the next installment one of these days.

In honor of this momentous publishing debut, I decided to design a cover for the book.  Now that it's many weeks later, I finally got around to adapting the cover design for my blog header.  That was always the plan, I was just slow in getting to it. 

In ironic celebration of my redesign, I got a nice little pop up message telling me that I had reached the limit of my photo storage for my blog. 

What?! Didn't even know there was such a thing. Turns out that every photo I upload is stored in a Picasa album. Which is now full.

But really, it's mostly Google's fault in the first place.  They make it so hard to do a relatively simple thing like change your blog header.  Even though I specifically designed this new one to be EXACTLY the same size and shape as the old one, it always looked smushed or stretched or off-center or something.

I was hating Google for stealing my evening and half of my sleep.  And for sending me searching all over the web for directions on how to change the html code to make my new header fit right.  I don't want to mess with html.  I'd rather just leave it alone.  And vice versa.

And then I learned that Picasa saves every single photo that gets sent to my blog.  They don't delete the photos I delete from my blog.  So now they have approximately 27 copies of various versions of my new header in a Picasa album that I didn't even know existed.  Curse them.

  I don't remember agreeing to let them store my photos (which I realize may not be their fault). And I can't figure out how to find out if my album is private. I do NOT want it public. I do NOT want people to be able to download my photos willy nilly. I went through a lot of effort figuring out how to remove that feature from my blog.

I feel a tremendous sense of relief having this blog book in my hands.  I am not naive enough to believe that blogger will last forever.  That they have my best interests at heart.  I certainly don't trust Google enough to give them sole stewardship over my family memories. 

So, in an attempt to stall the death of my free blog, I started deleting photos.  Which caused some unintended changes to past blog posts.  And then I started deleting whole posts.  And I found myself wondering if it's really worth all this effort to postpone the inevitable, wondering if I shouldn't just use my blogging time to return to scrapbooking.  To preserve my family memories the way I want to, a method that doesn't force me to work with big, corporate vultures or html.  A method that puts those memories in my hands and my home, right where they belong.

I am irritated.  As if you couldn't tell.  Google/Picasa/BigCorporateVulture is nice enough to offer more photo storage. . . for a price.  FIVE WHOLE DOLLARS!  A year.  Ok, Ok.  That's peanuts, right?  Well, right.  It's the principle that rubs me the wrong way.  Because suddenly free blogging isn't free anymore.

My frenzy of deletions may have bought me a week, or a month.  Probably not much more than that with the volume of pictures I post.  Curse Google.  Curse Picasa.  They killed my blog.  Because either my free blog ends, or my blog ends.  Period.

Decisions, decisions . . .