How WQTH will preserve media “disk space” in the future, to preserve site security and anonymity

But first this message from Wolf…..

WARNING: DO NOT delete images in a media bucket, once they have been used in an article / post / comment – you will ruin that article / post / comment, plus ANY OTHER POSTS which used that image, which you may not know about.

SHORT VERSION: NO DELETIONS.

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I promised that I would do this post at 45%, and at 46.6%, I’m almost not a liar. But my plan was to do it before 50%, and that is working out pretty nicely.

HUH?

What I am talking about is HOW FULL OUR MEDIA BUCKET IS.

Here is what our media bucket looks like.

This list of images you see actually scrolls on FOREVER. It’s generally easier and very convenient to SEARCH THROUGH IT, using the search widget near the top, and the name of the image file, or some fragment of it. Search on “melania”, and you get DOZENS of wonderful pictures of our beautiful FLOTUS.

As Wheatie has pointed out, media searches are a GREAT WAY of conserving media bucket space. Not only that – people can replay their favorite images, which are extremely popular. All I have to do is type in “field” and I know that I will get back WHEATIE WARRIOR!!!

Right now, our media bucket is ALMOST half-way full.

I had PROMISED that I would have a solution READY before 50%, so that we would all begin a solid conservation plan when we got to 50% full.

We’re almost there now – hence this post.

If we do nothing, then in roughly a year or two, it will fill up. So we have to make a choice:

• let it fill up, then pick a WordPress purchase plan, which lowers security and anonymity below what I consider acceptable values.
• let it fill up, then move to a new, similar, WordPress site, and keep this one as a kind of archival “Volume I” of WQTH. This is not a bad option. It can be repeated endlessly, and is a kind of fail-safe back-up plan, TBH.
• begin using this site’s media bucket only for header images, which have to be in this site’s media bucket – not elsewhere. Host MOST of our images somewhere else. This would likely keep the site open indefinitely, as the WordPress basic offering media bucket size will likely increase faster than we can fill it with header images.
• move to a completely different secure and anonymous platform, such as a theoretical “Gab Blogs”.

My choice is now to pursue the THIRD option, with the SECOND as our backup.

The GOOD NEWS is that I have a great way to do this.

Hosting images elsewhere is the key. The PROBLEM is that this adds a level of complication which most authors find very annoying – including ME ME ME.

For example, I am VERY adept at using IMGUR for storing images. Observe….

See some familiar images from my comments? Imgur is where I store a LOT of my memes and handy pictures for use in comments. It’s also quite usable for images in WordPress articles, too.

I will admit that it’s marginally easier to just upload a picture to the WQTH media bucket when doing an article here, but the small effort required to upload it to Imgur instead, and then use a LINK to the Imgur location, is not bad at all. This is a GREAT way to save space. A few seconds? Not a problem.

However, I have to admit that the searching isn’t as great on Imgur, and some people just don’t like it. And YES, there are other hosting sites, but they all have problems. Photobucket will ransom you hard for a paid account, and limits the bandwidth of your images. Others – well, let’s just say that I preferred Imgur.

Many people find that the sign-up process for Imgur is not trivial. Worse, getting onto there without having to type in the password every time can be a challenge for some. It’s easy to get locked out of Imgur if you forget your password. Finally, getting quickly to the plain image URL takes some practice.

All of these reasons were why I was balking at doing this post when we hit 45%. I just didn’t feel like I could offer a GREAT solution.

WELL, now I CAN offer a great solution. I tested out something, and it works like crazy.

Let me see if you can figure it out.

You know that I had ANOTHER WordPress blog before this one – and before the U Tree – right?

Well, it has a media bucket just like this one.

OK – I should say ALMOST like this one…..

So this is ALL you have to do.

• make sure you have your own blog on WordPress, like https://wolfmoon1776.wordpress.com/
• get a bookmark or favorite to its media bucket (authors know how to find the media bucket)
• keep that bookmark very handy, so you can open up that media bucket whenever you need
• upload all your images except headers to that personal WordPress media bucket
• search for images as you would in the WQTH media bucket
• to get the URL of an image, right-click on it
• to put an image in an article here, add an image block

• click on “Insert From URL”

• in the widget that says “Paste or type URL”, paste in the URL of the image in YOUR media bucket
• it might look like https://wolfmoon1776.files.wordpress.com/2020/02/wordpress_image_block_ready.png?resize=219%2C219
• remove the resize stuff
• it now looks like https://wolfmoon1776.files.wordpress.com/2020/02/wordpress_image_block_ready.png
• hit “Return” or the Return button onscreen
• you get an image like this

• or this

• or even this

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There you have it – easy as pie.

Now, if you feel like an image is REALLY important, and it MUST be stored SAFELY and SECURELY on the main WQTH site in our communal media bucket, then by all means do so. But otherwise, you will find that it’s fairly easy to store images on your own site, and there are numerous advantages to this as well.

If you need help setting this up, let me know. Likewise, if you think you’ve found a better solution, please let me know THAT in the comments below, and I’ll add it to this presentation as an addendum.

Thank you for all your hard work. Hopefully, I’ve not added too much to it by this workaround.

You will have plenty of time (the percentages are moving REALLY slowly now) to figure this out before we get to 50%. At that point, I plan to unleash WHEATIE WARRIOR OF THE MEDIA BUCKET to remind people about conserving the resources of our beautiful site!

We’ve got a good thing here, and I think if we stick with THE PLAN, we’re gonna be able to keep it that way for a LONG, LONG TIME.

W