Over this weekend and the last several days, I’ve gone through posts that contain photographs, and replaced all of the images with ones hosted directly at ComeAcross. In the past, I’ve used photos hosted with third party photo sharing services, and I realize now that’s a folly.

If a third party service goes down, which is very likely with beta services, my photos become unavailable. Even if that service is not in beta, a simple action like closing one’s account shuts down access to all of the photos uploaded there. It’s much more practical to host the photos together with my website. That way, I am fully responsible for making sure that all of my content is accessible. If something goes down, I can take care of it. If I need to change web hosting providers, I simply transfer all of my files over to another server.

It’s not as simple to transfer one’s content with photo sharing services, no matter what they may promise. Image and meta data portability is still not 100% there, and it doesn’t help when a photo sharing service advertises their API’s availability for more than a year, yet fails to put it out for public use. It also doesn’t help when said portability is rendered useless by the amount of compression used on the uploaded originals, or the deletion of meta data embedded in the originals…

You see, everyone is ready to promise the world to you when they want to sell you on something. Quite often, that “world” is nothing more than an empty little shell. I speak in general terms here, from the things I’ve learned through my various experiences — mostly recent ones…

At any rate, I’ve still got to modify a number of posts, but I thought I’d point out the ones I’ve already worked on. They’re quite a few, and I’m happy with the results so far. Here they are:

• Today is Spring Day in Romania
• Croissants with butter, sour cream and cinnamon
• Biking on the Via Appia (part 1)
• Biking on the Via Appia (part 2)
• A side by side comparison of the 2003 MINI Cooper S and the new 2007 MINI Cooper S
• Camping in the Shenandoah National Park
• ffmpegx, the best video compression and encoding on the Mac
• A quick maintenance operation that will prolong the life of your laptop
• The HP Pavilion m7480n desktop reviewed
• Things I don’t like about my Mac
• Onion tea is really gross, onion tea I hate the most
• Want to see the inside of a SanDisk Cruzer 1.0GB flash drive?
• The National Seminary at Forest Glen
• A second trip to the National Seminary at Forest Glen
• A trip to the C&O Canal Park
• Do you like macro photos?

Also see Photography, take two, part two for more updated posts.