This had been the longest break I've ever taken from blogging since I started blogging 19 years ago.
There were many reasons why I just lost interest in blogging for the past one year, from personal reasons, to having to use this platform's unfriendly User Interface that seems to be stuck in 2010, to having a completely screwed-up AdSense integration, to the simple fact that people just don't read blogs anymore.
But being a blogger for 19 years, it has become a part of my identity now. It is who I am, whether I like it or not. So, here is me, an old fart blogger, cracking my knuckles one more time to give blogging one more shot.
I will be doing two things very differently this time though.
#1. No more MS Word.
I always used to write my blog on a Microsoft Word document first. Back in 2004 when I first started blogging, internet was expensive. Gen-Z may never understand this, but I used to update my blog by going to a cyber cafe, google all the info I want to know about or require as references, copy them to a floppy drive, rush back to my hostel and then copy the files to my offline computer, read them, and then open an MS word file and start writing.
Once I was done writing, I would copy the Word doc back to the floppy, run back to the internet cafe, open my Word doc from the floppy drive, copy the content and then update my blog. Phew!
Yeah, life was something else back then.:D
And as the years passed by, technology improved. Pen drives replaced Floppies, and affordable home internet connections replaced Cyber cafes. Smartphones too entered the market and suddenly we had the internet right in our pockets! Who would have thunk?
However, my habit of writing a blog post on an MS Word file never ceased. I continued doing that but I started facing a lot of issues.
Let me try to explain this as simply as I can.
Back in the early 2000s (when Google had just acquired this blogging platform), I could just copy-paste whatever I wrote on a Word doc to my blog and that was it. Everything was fine.
Then came the change in Blogger.com's CMS (Content Management System) and suddenly everything I copied also copied the hidden MS Word unicode characters and pasted them on my blog update! It was a shitstorm of texts and strange symbols everywhere. And so I would first copy-paste what I had written on a Word doc to a Text document to remove all the formatting, and THEN copy-paste that to my blog again.
That worked for a couple of years, until Blogger.com suddenly decided to follow what Wordpress was doing back then and became a WYSIWYG editor. That is "What You See Is What You Get", meaning, whatever you type on any text editor, it will appear exactly like that online.
And so, again I had to change the steps in which I would copy-paste. The good thing about that is that if I had put a paragraph or italics on my Word document and copy-pasted that to my blog, it would also put a paragraph or italic in my blog editor, and so on.
All was well for a couple of years, until Blogger.com suddenly changed their CMS again. Now it was no longer WYSIWYG. I mean, it's still WYSIWIG to an extent, but only if you were typing on the platform's editor. Anything pasted from outside to the platform's editor was no longer WYSIWG. For example, a paragraph or a quote or a line break was no longer recognised as that after copy-pasting it. My blog post became a clusterfuck of words and sentences all joined together after copy-pasting!
After a couple of weeks of frustration, I found out the only way to tackle that was either to use this platform's editor directly, or to manually put HTML commands in my Word doc itself while writing my blog post.
I told myself I wasn't going to succumb to Google's demand. I'm a rebel, hell yeah. And so for every blog post I was writing on a Word doc, I was also including different HTML commands like breaks and paragraphs, as well as div, span, font face, size, alignment, a href, img src, etc., right in the middle of my blog content!
Yeah, you really have no idea what was going on behind the scenes of my blog updates, lolz.
And that worked well when I copy-pasted from a Word doc to here, except for the fact that I had to spend so many extra minutes writing all the HTML commands.
The reason for all these restrictions is, I guess Google's marketing execs want bloggers to write directly on their platform itself, instead of using a third-party software. After all, more time spent on their platform means higher retention, longer session duration, more engagement time, higher CTR and conversion rate etc etc, which will give these execs a nice bonus on their next Quarterly meet.
Now that I'm finally going to start blogging again, yeah, screw my defiance. I surrender to Google. I will be writing directly on this platform for any new updates from now on, including this post. I no longer have the time or energy to do those extra things. You win, Google. You happy?
Kima - 0, Evil Corporation - 1. :P
#2. Image hosting sites.
This is the second big change I'm making.
For years, the biggest headache I have when it comes to my blog update is where I'm hosting my images.
To a layman, let me explain. If you want to put an image on your blog post, you have to upload it somewhere and then embed that image on your blog post. The place where you upload it is called an image hosting site. Many people use the default Google Photos or Google Drive image gallery to upload their blog images now, but back then, there were no such things as Google Photos or Drive. We had to host our blog images elsewhere.
I selected Photobucket as it was the most popular image hosting site back then, and being a bit OCD about the way I arrange my image folders, I was able to do that neatly at Photobucket.
All went well for a couple of years, until I crossed the free limit. I could no longer upload any new images unless I pay, and I really don't blame them for that, after all, they also need to earn some money right?
I became a premium member.
I think that happened around 2008'ish because I was working and had a credit card by then. Since I already had hundreds of blog posts and images, I didn't want to change my hosting service provider and so I was paying $9.99 per month with by credit card for the additional storage space and bandwidth.
And that went well for a couple of years, until 2017, when Photobucket dropped a mega bomb. They removed all free accounts, including lower-tiered premium accounts like mine that were paying $9.99 per month, and suddenly charged an exorbitant $399.99 annual fee to continue using their service!
That was such a dick move. By then I already had more than 650 blog posts with over 2000 images in my Photobucket account. My 650+ blog posts no longer displayed any images and all Photobucket accounts across the world were held at ransom. Yup, there was indeed a severe backlash. People started migrating to other service providers (we couldn't even access our accounts to download our old images).
A year later, they introduced a much lower fee but I'm sure there were hardly any takers. They had already broken our trust completely.
I shifted to AWS to host my blog images and set up my own server there.
That went well for a couple of years and I was paying around ₹ 100 a month on bandwidth usage, sometimes up to ₹ 500 if I had a series of "hit" blog posts.
Now a bandwidth usage is the amount I get charged every time people visit my blog and view the images on that post. Let me explain it this way. Suppose I write a new blog post, where I have put 10 new images. I upload those images to my AWS server. Now when you visit my new blog post, my HTML sends a message request to my AWS server to display the images embedded in that post. Every time AWS displays an image to a new user, it charges me. That is known as bandwidth usage.
And I was okay with paying ₹ 100 to ₹ 500 per month, you know, until CoVid happened and one of my blog posts went viral!
It was the Mizoram: Setting an example for India post, which had over a lakh views. Now, a lakh may not be much, but that post had more than 50 high-resolution images! My bandwidth usage charge was shooting up like crazy, in real-time! I was panicking (at the same time excited my post about Mizoram was going viral across India, with many renowned celebrities sharing it).
I watched my bill shooting up every minute! I couldn't disable the images because there were like 1000 unique visitors every hour. And so I quickly resized each image quality from 10MB to 2MB and replaced it with the same file name in my AWS folder.
That reduced my cost vastly, but it was still going up as the number of unique visitors kept increasing.
And so the next day, I created a free account at Imgur, another popular image hosting site, uploaded the same images there and then edited that viral blog post and linked the images to my new Imgur account instead.
The exponentially rising AWS cost finally stopped completely. Phew!
You know how much my AWS bill for that month came to?
₹ 7000!!!!
Yeah, that was so sad.
I stopped using AWS after that, and continued using Imgur for all my blog image hosting.
But again, the problem with Imgur is that, even though I absolutely love it so far, who knows, one fine day, they just might go the Photobucket way and screw me all over again. After all, capitalism.
Instead, I might as well just host all my blog images here on Google Drive itself, especially since I am already paying extra for the additional 100 GB a year. Like, if Google decides to screw me one fine day, then it will be just Google screwing me and not 4-5 different companies screwing me together. The lesser of two evils, lolz.
You hear that Google? You win this round too.
The only problem is, like I said at the very beginning of this post, Blogger.com's UI is extremely outdated. Like, if I am inserting an image, whether I link the image to my Google Drive or Imgur, I only have the option of selecting which FIXED size I want the image to be displayed as here. Like seriously???
We're living in the age of "responsive design" where people can access blogs from all sorts of devices, from desktop computers to tablets to phones to VR headsets to even a freaking washing machine. Fixed widths cannot cater to all these different resolutions because this platform's template hasn't been designed to handle it. And so keeping a fixed-width image will display differently across different mediums.
Hence, for now, the only solution to prevent this is to add the <img width="100%"> command in the HTML section of each blog post image. Sad.
The other even sadder part is, Google Drive photos cannot be embedded directly on a blog. I mean I can see it on my browser after I embed it because I am logged in with my Google ID on my browser, but you won't be able to see it even if the image is set to public view.
So apparently, there is a different embedded link for each Google Drive image link (which begs the question, what is the point of having the privacy setting of public or private then?). I know, such a roundabout.
So, after a couple of trial and error and reading up different forums, I found the two best solutions to tackle this:
The first is this post by Temitope Ayodele who tells us to simply replace the Google Drive image link with a different link (mentioned in the link) and we just have to insert that image's ID in it. This works.
The second is an embedded link generator by Labnol who tells us to paste the Google Drive image link, click "Generate" and it generates a new link that you can paste in your <img src> link. This works too.
A big thanks to these two for helping me solve my problem.
(Edit: One small difference I found out after publishing this post - In the first method listed above, Facebook will not fetch the image to display as a thumbnail when you post a link on FB, whereas in the second method, Facebook will display the image as a thumbnail.)
I still don't understand why there can't be an option to get the embedded link directly from our Google Drive image link itself??? Why Google why?
You know how much pain it's going to be if I write a new post with 20-30 images in it and I have to follow the above 3-4 steps procedure for every single image? :(
By the way, Google Photos is considered to be more user-friendly and seamless than Google Drive for embedding blog images, but the problem is, you can't create sub-folders within Google Photos like you can in Google Drive (again Google, why?) As I mentioned before, I am very organised when it comes to storing my blog images. I keep all the images of a particular post in separate folders, each one numerically named and arranged alphabetically.
That's the reason why I prefer Google Drive over Google Photos. I want a folder (for example, "BLOG") and within that, I want all the sub-folders of each blog post (for example, "001-xx post", "002-yy post" and so on). One solution is to make all these sub-folders in the primary level of Google Photos itself, but that would mean my primary level is going to be flooded with 800+ folders! If you have no qualms about where your photo goes, then by all means, use Google Photos.
Anyway let's see, maybe in the future, Google will make it easier to embed images from Google Drive or at least give us an option to create sub-folders in Google Photos.
And I hope they also finally wake up and remember they have a blogging division, lolz. Their official Blogger.com blog is just so sad, where it's been 2 years since their last update, and before that, it was just one post a year. :D
We used to joke that maybe there is just one employee left in the whole of Google's blogging division who's overseeing everything, but I fear that is becoming more of a reality now.
So, whatever the future may hold, here is looking forward to many new blog posts in spite of all these hassles. Hope you all start visiting again. Also, yeah, I promise I won't be this technical in my next update. Cheers, everyone.
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