I'm getting a little bit tired of AOL Hometown these days. For the last couple of months I've been getting bandwidth restriction messages, and little 'red x' icons on all of the images in my journal. I have no idea why, as the (what 25 or so?) readers of my journal can't possibly be pulling down enough bandwidth to pass any limit AOL might have set. Still, (former) Journals Editor Joe (we'll miss ye, laddie) warned me last month that I might not want to depend on AOL Hometown for very much longer. He wouldn't say why, but I got the impression there was some kind of change in the wind. I suspect AOL Hometown storage might go the way of the dodo in the foreseeable future. Joe suggested I move all my pictures to AOL Pictures, but I'm thinking I might go to another storage place altogether.
So, to that end, I have downloaded every file in my AOL Hometown ftp space (just under 40 Megabytes worth) to a folder on my computer, and am currently looking for suggestion on where to put them. OK, so maybe that wasn't phrased very well. I'm looking for advice on what file storage service to use for the pictures I display on my journal. I'm open to any and all suggestions. What have you got for me?
Speaking of (former) Journals Editor Joe (we'll miss ye, laddie), it occurs to me that one of the holes he leaves behind is an easy one to fill. For the last several months, Joe has been posting a regular Friday rundown of journal posts tagged with the Technorati tag 'blogplugs'. I've tagged a few entries that way, and have received a few new visitors from it, so there seems to be some value to it. I am willing to pick up that small portion of Joe's regular presence in J-Land on behalf of the community.
Each week (barring a more official participant, like John Scalzi for instance), I will search out those AOL journal posts tagged with the Technorati tag 'blogplugs', and feature a representative listing on Fridays. Joe, your legacy shall live on!
(Edited Thursday, 10:17PM - The AOL Journals team has picked up the ball over at the Magic Smoke blog, and will be featuring Friday blogplugs there, as per usual, so my efforts in that arena are not needed. Continue to check out the Magic Smoke blog for AOL Journals updates.)
Thursday, October 18, 2007
Advice?
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6 comments:
Great idea about the blogplugs, Paul. AND, thanks for the heads up about file manager. Dammit. It seems most people use photobucket around here... I will check around too.
be well,
Dawn
ps... Much more importantly... did u vote for my pet pic? LOL
Try Flickr www.flickr.com .. no charge, some upload and viewing restictions for free version .. if you want to go for the pro version, its only $25 a year.
Have used it since I started posting and have never had a problem
I use flickr. They're fine if you want to use them to blog your photos, but you have to use the right code as per their TOS. I found flickr to be very addictive and I got involved with groups and meeting people in real life for photo shoots. Much fun.
Photobucket is another site that a lot of people use.
-- Shelly
AOL is struggling as a company these days. The news yesterday is that they are laying off 2,000 of their employees (out of its worldwide workforce of 10,000). I think you did the right thing by backing up your files.
I bailed on the Hometown - AOL member FTP space after reading some comments from Stephanie early this year. I'd observed the same issues of photos not loading or randomly loading at times. I went to flickr (paid account) but took my old journal offline instead of relinking all the photos.
If you are looking for something AOL Branded, there is Bluestring located at bluestring.com. It's essentially AOL's X-drive. Same deal, 5 gig online storage for an AOL or AIM user. With X-drive the service was invite or email share but Bluestring lets you share in other ways. I briefly tested it out after it was released in Sept. 07.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/09/17/aol-launches-bluestring/
I'm not sure if Bluestring lived past Tuesday's aol wacking day though as I was unable to login to it today. It's beta so it might just be weekend broken.
I use AOL Pictures. I haven't had any problems, but I've never tried anything else.
I also miss Joe, but I'm glad they are continuing Magic Smoke and Blogplugs. Was anyone else just a little bit offended that the post-Joe tutorial was about tagging? I'm not a blog expert by any means, but I was able to figure that one out on my own fairly quickly.
Beth
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