I am now living the iPad Lifestyle

Back on December 27, 2015, I had purchased an iPad Air 2 with a wireless keyboard and was imaging a life using an iPad as my laptop replacement. Almost 3 years later (minus 21 days), that day has come. When I got the new iPad Pro (2018 3rd generation model), I was wondering if I could record a podcast and do all that entails to posting said podcast online without the aid of another device (laptop, chromebook, etc.). I found a video on YouTube by Christopher Lawley, about this possibility using an app called Ferrite. I tested it out and recorded a podcast episode for the first time on an iPad Pro and successfully completed the task with no other devices.

On To SquareSpace!

So after a month at most using Blogspot as my content manager for my podcast I decided to give SquareSpace a shot. I’m so glad I did. At first I signed up for the 14-day trial period and as I was fiddling with the layout and pages and so forth I came upon an amazing discovery!

SquareSpace has really upped their game to give their customers “unlimited storage” as well as unlimited bandwidth. For as long as I can remember, all across the board,  the max size limit to any file that could be uploaded on their site was 20MB. It seems at some point they deviated from that policy and allowed audio files have a max size limit of 160MB which is more than enough for my podcasting needs. I was paying $15/month to Libsyn for 250MB of monthly storage which is more than I needed but their next tier down only gives 50MB which wasn’t enough. For $8/month, I can use SquareSpace as both my content provider and content manager.

I got to kill 2 birds with one stone, save some money and still have ownership of it all. Prior to this discovery I was thinking about foregoing ownership of the audio files and just putting them on Archive.org. Now I don’t have to. I’m pretty glad with this decision.

Which leads me to think about the future of this blog. I guess for now I’ll still leave it on WordPress. I don’t blog enough to want to finance it and I’ve written so much over the years I don’t know if I want to move it all. Not to mention I have another domain name that points to here.

For now, this blog is still safe on WordPress. Maybe someday later that’ll change.

Ending My Run On WordPress

It’s been some time since I’ve taken this blog seriously. I know part of it has to do with my reluctance to write anymore and my increase in media consumption, as was pointed out in my most recent post from a few months back. I think the other reason might be the changes that have undergone with WordPress as well.

Maybe it’s just me but lately I’ve felt lost navigating around my WordPress account in recent months/years. I felt it was much easier to get around and to get right to writing. I feel like it’s more distracting and more about discovering what else is going on around the WordPressverse and less with pushing me to publish my stuff.

I can understand somewhat why WP is taking this direction. They’ve probably lost some current and future customers to social network sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and sure a small (really small) amount to Google+. I’m sure Tumblr is going through some bumps in the road (another WP rival) .

But what I loved about WP in the past was it’s no compromise approach to blogging and website publishing. Yeah Tumblr was a new upstart not too long ago and they were already taking the  social network approach just as Facebook was ending MySpace’s reign and Twitter was just developing and reducing their fail whale outages. It seems now that WP has finally given and tried to meld social networking and website publishing together.

Granted maybe a lot of people like this new interface and I’m and old fuddy duddy reminiscing about days of yore. I just don’t quite enjoy myself on WordPress as I have in the past. I just started podcasting again. In the past I would’ve immediately made a new site for my show on WordPress. This time however I’m going to give Blogger a chance (something I never would have said when I was a huge WordPress fan).

Blogger doesn’t seem to have changed much since Google bought them way back when. And yes their websites don’t look as spiffy as WordPress sites. But they kept the user interface the same and I feel I can navigate it much better than the new WP version. I go right to my blog and publish my podcast. I may even import this blog over there as well if I still feel like blogging as well. I use a lot of Google services as it is. What’s one more.

2012 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

600 people reached the top of Mt. Everest in 2012. This blog got about 2,700 views in 2012. If every person who reached the top of Mt. Everest viewed this blog, it would have taken 5 years to get that many views.

Click here to see the complete report.

A Message To Current FeedBurner Subscribers

Since the inception of this blog I have been using FeedBurner as the main aggregator for my RSS Feed. It was user-friendly. I got to feed the stat hungry side of my brain by seeing who was reading my blog and from where and how many were subscribed to it, etc. Also the great thing about FeedBurner was that if I ever decided to move my blog somewhere else, with FeedBurner, I wouldn’t have to hassle my subscribers with re-subscribing (I would simply do all the work on the back-end and no one would be the wiser).

Well with the recent updates to Word Press stats and subscription options, my need to simplify my digital footprint and my increasingly infrequent visits to FeedBurner, the one-stop shopping option of having everything done on the WordPress side of things has become more appealing. Consequently, I’ve wiped all traces of FeedBurner from my site and will be deleting the FeedBurner RSS feed within the next weeks or so. Unfortunately, the thing that I’ve been helping subscribers avoid is no longer feasible and anyone who has subscribed to this blog via FeedBurner will have to re-subscribe via the options listed above on the right-sidebar (the RSS Feed will now be http://juliofromny.com/feed/). If you’re already subscribed to this blog via the WordPress options then you’re ahead of the game and have to nothing else except wait for the next blog entry hit your inbox, rss reader, etc.

I do apologize for this inconvenience and I will make an effort not to encumber you readers any further. Please use the new subscription options and I’ll try to write more often.