Trying to avoid paying for my blog.

Being poor/cheap isn’t easy sometimes.

I don’t want to pay for Xanga Premium. I know, they’ll let me upload all the images I want and stop running those ridiculous “[Imperative verb] the [noun] and get a free iPod!” ads on my page. Frankly, other places will let me blog for free and let me upload DVDs worth of junk onto it. The main reason I’m sticking with Xanga is that I like to have a consistent address. In my early days of having an email address I switched it around too often (actually, every time I changed service providers) and lost contact with a lot of friends. Now it’s at iWon; I’ve had it for six years; I have not won a red cent from iWon even though they’ve told me in all that time that I could win thousands of dollars; and my friends, Amazon, and eBay know where to send email. (Unless they send it to my FirstClass account, which I check maybe once a week, which annoys people… but mainly people who don’t know me. So, no big loss.)

So how do I get all these images on here? Simple. I stick pictures on my website and link to them. That, or link to stuff on other people’s websites, which annoys them when everyone does it—suddenly they have all this bandwidth being used, yet nobody’s going to their site to buy their product or see their “Get a free iPod!” ads. Case in point—the image from www.churchsigngenerator.com that I posted Tuesday. They had a minor snit. So I stuck the image on my website; now Blogger can pitch a snit if it wants to, and the churchsigngenerator people get off my ass.

Bandwidth is a pain. You want popularity—well, most people do—but if you get it, you need to spend more money to make sure everyone can access your page. And if you don’t want to pay more money, people can’t access your page, which annoys them, which means they won’t try to access it, which means… I’m sure some economist has figured out how this works by now, with charts and graphs and calculus equations and everything. I’ll leave it to that nerd, and go to bed already.