I’ve recently made three small updates to my site.
I suppose the first one isn’t so small. I’ve changed web hosts. Last week I migrated this site from WP Engine (which was getting very costly) to Dreamhost (which, so far, has under performed).
Moving the site was rather painless. However, the performance of Dreamhost’s shared services is very poor. I don’t even know why they offer it. My blog does not receive very high traffic but I get warnings nearly every day about there being performance issues related to my site. I would think that WordPress, out-of-the-box with very little in the way of plugins, for a personal web site would be easy to host. A slam dunk. I guess not.
So, at my next opportunity I’ll be looking to move hosts once again (though I did pay for an entire year). Recommendations welcome. I figure $100-200 a year is plenty for a personal blog.
Second, I’ve removed the ads I had on my site. You may not have even noticed them. That is because I only showed ads on posts that were older than 7 days old. I did this for a few months as an experiment. The ads made money but I hated seeing them on my site. The experiment was to see whether or not I could tolerate having them for the few dollars they’d generate. The answer is no.
Third, recently I’ve begun posting groups of images to my site. The reason I’ve started doing this is to remove some friction in my photo publishing process. I used to post single images per post and so trips or photoshoot days were spread out over many posts. Now, though, I’m wrapping all of those images into single posts, like this one. I find this much easier and so I’ll likely do it more often.
The problem then became that on my images page there was no way to tell which posts had single images or which had multiple. I’ve now added a small visual cue to show how many images are on that post. I like the way it turned out.
Decades in and my personal site continues to be one of my very favorite projects.