Goodbye Blipfoto

It's been fun while it lasted. Due to growing irritations with Blipfoto I'm moving to my own hosted site. Not to discredit Blipfoto here though.

Any site can be slower for some time while they experience some growing pains. I know that first-hand, having worked at a webhosting firm which became quite popular really fast. We could hardly add more servers to keep up. Recent downtime issues haven't been my worries.

The problem for me lies in an inherent mismatch between my primary shooting style, and Blipfotos rules and philosophies. The one photo a day, taken on that day rule... it simply isn't for me. While I do strive to shoot multiple times a week, I don't have the time to do it every day. And when I shoot, I'll often have multiple great shots. Having my own site means I set the rules, and can post whatever I want, whenever I want to.

The one thing I expected when I came here was actually to find a good community. While there surely is a community, the thing I find lacking is constructive criticism, or pretty much and criticism at all. I'm in this to improve my shooting as much as anyone else, but yet no-one is telling me specifically what they like and don't like about the shots. "Great shot!" comments aren't helpful.

Then there's something nagging me at a more basic level. I have the technical know-how to set up my own site, have everything exactly as I want. As a computer nerd, I like having everything under version control. On my new site, posts are text files which I can edit with whatever I want. I'm pretty sure that in 50 years time, when I'm old and grey, while the software which currently transforms that into HTML files may no longer work (it probably won't), the text files will still be readable just fine, and I could write a script at that time which extracts the titles and bodies of the posts, and outputs them in whatever format people use by then.

Wanting to have everything hosted under my own domain name, under my own banned is another factor. At some point, I'll occasionally post a regular blogpost. I can't do that here, and I'd like a one-stop hub for my online presence.

It's been fun, but Blipping isn't for me. Hope to see you at my new site, I'll be working on it in the weeks to come, one thing to do is commenting, but I wanted to switch and keep my pace going.