For a writer with limited time, a blog seems like a good idea. Years ago WordPress emerged as the premier site on which to host such a venture—it was free (but like all things in the tech revolution it would eventually start charging a subscription fee), easy to use, and friendly to your average Luddite. Now that I’ve been doing this some dozen years you might think that coming up with daily topics is the difficult part. Well, it is a challenge sometimes, I admit, but the hardest part is coming up with images. Occasionally I have an image around which to base a post, but the fact is I’ve discovered several blogs because I was searching for an image. So I started putting an image in each post. So far, so good.
WordPress has evolved over the years. It has become more and more commercial. After so much space is filled on your site (I pay regular fees for both the space and for the domain name) you must upgrade. The next upgrade available to me is “Business.” This blog is purely an avocation. Any writer who doesn’t offer online content these days, at least according to the marketers and publicists I know, will never write a break-through book. From my own experience, agents won’t even touch you unless you’ve got a far larger following than mine (and I’ve been faithful for a dozen years). Anyway, I don’t want to pay for a business plan, so I reuse a lot of images. That is the most time-consuming part of posting on this blog.
You see, I post each day immediately before work. To search over twelve years of images is difficult on WordPress. Many of my images are my own, and my phone names them “img” (which autocorrect wants to make “omg”). Searching those in WordPress to find a specific image can easily take an hour. Considering the time these pieces are posted, you get an idea of when I have to start. Good thing I’m an early riser! My relationship with technology is an uneasy one. I appreciate content. Producing it is an act of pure creativity and it’s important to me to do it every single day. But work is non-negotiable. Metrics apply. Consequences for not meeting them can be significant. Where is that image I thought would be perfect for the post I wrote? I should’ve renamed them before using them. But just this moment, work’s about to start. Now, what am I going to use to illustrate this post?
