Spaced out
My blog turned 40 recently. Megabytes that is. I wasn’t aware of this. One day it was humming along; the next day it went clunk. Suddenly, I was unable to post. I thought it might be something I did in one of the templates. Something HTML related. I am the same way with HTML as I am with my car. I like to open the hood and stick my hands way down in the engine and wiggle something. I don’t know what that something is or does, but usually I’ll end up greasy in the process. If I wiggle something in my car engine and have to wash my hands with grease remover then I feel like I’ve given it my all. After that, I call and arrange for my car to be fixed by an expert. I like it when there is still a little grease under my fingernails when I arrive at the shop. I'll rest my hands on the service advisor’s desk, tap my fingers (dirty nails facing forward) and say, “yeah, all of that seemed O.K. when I checked it, but you might want to have the mechanic take a look.”
With a blog, though, there really isn’t anybody to call. You can ask some blogging friends or leave a message on a message board pleading for help, but in the end, you go it alone. I spent a couple of long nights loading and reloading software, making changes to templates. Nothing worked. Finally, I figured out that my blog was megabyte challenged. Radio Userland gives you 40 MB of space when you sign on. I figured I also received 40 MB of additional space every year when I renewed my license, but I was wrong. Truth is, I never looked. I finally found the place where such statistics about usage are kept. My blog weighed in at “40.1 MB of 40 MB available space.” No wonder I couldn’t squeeze in even one more story.
I did a little research and discovered that I could buy more storage. Fifty megabytes costs an additional $40 or so. But being the frugal guy that I am (except when it comes to buying overpriced sports equipment for my son), I figured I could create some space first by tightening things up around here. So, the blog went on a diet. Perhaps a better analogy is that the blog underwent liposuction. First, I sucked out all the pictures that I wasn’t using. Quite often when I am putting together a story I’ll place two or three jpeg files in my images directory and then choose only one of them to accompany the story. By rooting out the extraneous images I saved a little under a megabyte of space. And, just as I suspected, I was able to post new stories again. But that space quickly filled up. Then I found out that I could lipo-suck a few other files that didn’t seem to serve any purpose (at least none that I know about yet). That freed up a little more space, which also disappeared in a flash.
Out of options, well, out of “free” options, I was left with one more choice. A Sophie’s Choice. For every new story I created, an old story had to go. I’m talking deleted from the blog. Damn, that’s harsh. Old favorites cast out on the curb in favor of some new flavor of the moment. I tried that a couple of times, dispatching a few stories that were deemed expendable. (In fairness, I have back-ups of everything I’ve ever written, so I can always retrieve these stories should Scribner or Simon & Schuster come a’knocking.)
I couldn’t keep doing the Sophie’s Choice thing with this blog. It was just too painful. So, over the weekend, I broke down and bought the 50 MB upgrade for Peeling Wallpaper. Now, when I click on the status button for my blog I see 50 MB of available space. I feel like that guy who lost a bunch of weight from eating only Subway sandwiches. They always show him wearing his old pants, which are big enough to hold two of him. Only my blog didn’t really lose weight. I just bought it a bigger pair of pants.
6:28:37 PM 
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