Changes are coming to my publishing

 

Time to say goodbye to some of my online tools

Goodbye Adobe

I've been using Lightroom and other Adobe products for years. I continued to use them even when they adopted a subscription model. For $10 a month it seemed to be a reasonable price for what they provided. Photoshop was mostly unused, and the AI feature was only useful to me for noise removal. After we returned from a few days in Cape Cod (photo above) I happened to look at my subscription and realized they had raised the monthly fee by 50%. Is this a tariff? It's affordable but it gave me the incentive to take a better look at my DxO PhotoLab 9 software that I purchased earlier in the year. I tried a few edits and was pleased with the result.

Goodbye Behance and Adobe Portfolio, Hello SmugMug

Behance and Adobe Portfolio are products that provide a high quality platform for photographs. Access is provided via the subscription. Behance is owned by Adobe but somewhat different, so when I leave they still might be accessible/ I decided to create an account with SmugMug which is a bit pricey but it allows unlimited storage. Lots to learn with this.

Goodbye Wordpress, Hello Substack and BuyMeCoffee

Years ago I thought it would be really cool to have my own website domain. I registered poltrack.net 

and signed up to host a wordpress site. Wordpress is free which seemed like a good deal until I really took a look at the hosting fees for the site (storage, servers etc). I was shocked to see that I had paid $623 for three years of service. Since I didn't see a monthly bill I ignored it. That charge will renew in the Summer of 2027 but I am getting off the train.

Back when I started I actually made some money with affiliate links to Amazon. It was paying for itself. I went afoul of their terms and they banned me for life.  I'm not expecting a pardon from Trump, so screw them.

I also discovered that I was not really writing for the publication. Wordpress is very customizable, you can do all kinds of things, but I just wanted to share photos, make some witty comments and interact with readers. This is stuff you can do with Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky and others, but in those cases you are playing in their yard, not your own.

Substack wasn't around when I first started with this, but it is very easy to use and it is possible to make some money doing it (Thanks again Jody). My first experience with blogging took place on BLOGGER which I am using for this post. My experience with that goes back to 2008. Google owns it and I was afraid they would abandon it as they did with Picasa (their photo editor) and Google+ (a superior social media product). They haven't dumped it so I used it for this posting.

Thanks to everyone that suspends their scrolling long enough to check in with me.