I think it’s desirable to be independent in my life online. I pay Antagonist for my webhosting and e-mail instead of using free services for those. It gives me flexibility and benefits my privacy, because I don’t trust big companies like Google with my data. However, when it comes to hosting photos I need to be more practical. That’s why I intend to migrate all my photos to Flickr, as I said in my previous post. I will use this account.
Why I switch to Flickr
My current account at Antagonist provides me with 3 GB of storage. This is not enough to store a lot of photos: the photos made by my Nikon D5100 weigh in at about 7 MB in the highest quality and resolution. That’s why I have to resize photos significantly before I upload them to my webspace. Antagonist also has a plan for unlimited storage and traffic, but this is twice as expensive. Being unemployed now, I don’t want to pay the higher price at this time.
Another issue is that my experience with the Gallery web-based photo gallery software was not positive. Some years ago I used it to publish photos on my blogs, but I still remember it gave me trouble and that the WordPress plugin didn’t work so well. At that point I started using NextGEN Gallery which is just a WordPress plugin. It does what it’s supposed to do, but I don’t feel comfortable with having an entire photo management solution integrated into WordPress. Its usability isn’t bad, but a dedicated solution would be better. These are the reasons I think Flickr is more convenient.
If I consider privacy, I’m a lot less concerned about Yahoo having my photos than if they handled my e-mail. All my photos on Flickr will be licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license anyway, so I don’t see any significant risks for my privacy.
Changing the WordPress theme
Another issue with my blog is that the Tarski theme doesn’t display well on small smartphone displays. I have noticed that nowadays we have responsive web design to solve this problem. It turns out that the current default theme, Twenty Thirteen, is a responsive theme. Try the demo and resize your browser window to see for yourself.
I don’t like how its appearance compares with my current child theme for Tarski, but I guess I’ll just make a new child theme for this theme then. I might have stayed with the Tarski theme if its developer is going to make it responsive too, but it’s very quiet on the Tarski website.