Sunday, 8 November 2009

On Running Out of Space in Blogger

No,I haven't, not yet, but Gary Rith has. He keeps doing that, so he's on Pottersblog NoIII
I was a bit worried that I might be running out of space in wherever my blog is kept, a shoebox on the top shelf, at the rear of one of Blogger's vast warehouse-caverns, I suspect.
How to know how much space I have left in my shoebox?

It turns out that blogger does not limit the size of the blog itself. The restriction is in the storage allotted to pictures, and pictures uploaded to blogger are held and retrieved from a Picasa web-album with a maximum size of 1024MB.
Put simply, your blog and its pictures are in separate shoe-boxes.
When you click on the "add image" icon, it opens another window. In the bottom right corner of that it tells you how much of your allotted space is in use. In my case, it says, right now "You are currently using 912MB (89%) of your 1024MB".

In my case the problem is not quite critical yet. I did a bit of searching. One method of dealing with it is to start a new blog, which was Gary's chosen route. This could be using the same template, same name even, just add a number. Or change one letter in the name. It would look the same.
Except, of course, there'd be no access back into the previous posts.
But there's another way. Just create another persona in blogger, and add that person as a contributor with full editorial rights to your existing blog. Your new persona has a completely fresh empty shoebox in the Blogger cavern, and posts added under the new persona don't impinge upon the
blog's original storage.
Thus, you get another year or so of posts before needing to create persona number 3.
You can help yourself by not uploading giant images, resize them to something less than the original.
Picasa's free image organiser/viewer has easy tools to do this. I use it as my default viewer and editor, I've tried others with vast resources which I never use, and Picasa's the one I like best. And I like that word "Free". It's less good on a mac, I hear.
Blogger's preferred route, of course, is to SELL you extra storage in your original account. Pthuie!