Decision Time Coming

I devoted a lot of time to Cosmic Focus and it's made me wonder whether I should keep this blog, Above Us Only Sky, going. It has it's problems - it's an older style Serendipity platform which, as far as I can tell, hasn't been updated since I started it on 6th July 2009. 

I have made 510 entries on this site (492 public and 18 drafts never finished), using 940 images in the process. I've typed 1.9 million characters at an average of about 3,900 characters per entry and written an average of 3.98 entries/month across 10.5 years. (not counting a number of early blogs which I regrettably deleted without saving).

Some of the features - and the overall Serendipity look - are a bit clunky and it's less easily promotable than my four photo-blog sites on WordPress. It's not built up any regular followers. I have to turn off comments after a post is a few weeks old, otherwise I get spam comments. 

I looked at transferring the site across to WordPress but whilst some blog sites are easily imported by WordPress, Serendipity is not. I could pay someone to do it for me but I'd be uncertain what I would end up with - and I'm not sure I could trust anyone on-line anyway. An alternative would be to do it myself, manually. Easily done but very time consuming, especially the photos.

I'm not sure how secure my blog archive is here. Will my ISP soon warn me I've used too much space on their server? Will they close it down before I can transfer it? (It nearly happened once!).  Will they start charging me for what has been a free service for the last ten years?

The traffic statistics are poor and not easy to evaluate. The log shows twenty hits (including four from me) between 7.00 pm and 10.45 pm this evening but the information is underwhelming and a running total of hits is not provided.

That's the cons, what about the pros?

None really, except the only real advantage is that keeping it here would be the easy way out for now. At least I own the name Above Us Only Sky here on Serendipity - I'd be surprised if it's available on WordPress.

What I do know is that my experiment of running this blog and three other blog sites on WordPress is not sustainable alongside the relatively successful "Cosmic Focus," which has passed 12,000 views in a niche market.

I enjoy sitting down and writing about current affairs, my disdain for organised religion and my general experiences with my hobby of astronomy. (I even enjoyed writing this). I don't really care too much if no one reads them, so long as I get some satisfaction from writing them.

However, when I really look at the pros and cons, it seems like I may have to make a decision. I can't run five blogs, a Flickr photo gallery, three twitter identities, my Facebook page (and admin for two group pages) and an Instagram gallery, as well as being webmaster for my astronomical society.

There, I've written my first blog for 2020!