Lots of photos but also a decision about this website

Before we get to the photos I’d like to discuss the future of this website. When I started this adventure almost 20 years ago it was relatively cheap to publish content. As a matter of fact it was free. I still use a number of free publishing platforms such as my Improves with Age substack and my On This Day coffee page.

However I was interested in having more sophisticated editing tools and decided to host my own website on my domain poltrack.net. It was cheap to register the domain, only $15 a year. WordPress is free but it needs to be hosted and that seemed reasonable at the time. I had signed up for three years of hosting and had lost track of when it was going to expire and what the future costs might be. It will be up for renewal next year (July 2027) and cost over $600! I’m not even certain whether that will cover three years.

Publish or Perish

As readers of this website know, I have not been posting for some time. I have a feed of my substack postings which happens automatically, but nothing original. I had grand plans when I started that I would have a revenue stream from advertisements and affiliate accounts. The Amazon affiliate program was great when I started until I fell out of favor with Bezos and was banned for life. The revenue from that was an incentive to publish frequently. Those were the golden years. I buy my stuff from Walmart and Chewy now (except mealworms for the bluebirds and oatmeal), Amazon and Prime are dead to me.

Too many subscriptions (I need to pare it down)

My WordPress hosting fees are only one of many subscription services I use. My photos are hosted on Flickr and Google Workspace, I subscribe to Adobe CC for photo editing software, Carbonite for backup, Microsoft for office 365, Cloud services and probably a few more I forgot about. It is time to simplify.

I just want to share photos

I realize that the primary reason I’ve created this thing is to share photos. But I didn’t want to be tied into the META Facebook and Instagram infrastructure. Zuckerberg is just as annoying as Bezos. I have a solution which has been hidiing in plain sight for years.

Flickr

It’s old, it’s clunky but I have been using it for decades and it still is supported. The photos load slowly but eventually they get there. I often get a a “bad panda” message from the software. Let’s take a look at some of my favorite photos taken in the month of June. I’ll create another album at the end of July. You can click on the photos and leave comments. Enjoy.

On This Day in June

21 photos