Tech Friday: If you have a blog, control your own content
Posted By RichC on February 28, 2014
Once upon a time it seemed smart to host only light content on my own blog. In the early days it was easy to store larger files like video, audio and 
photos “for free” with content hosts like YouTube, Flickr and Posterous (among others). The plus was that I didn’t fill the “out of pocket” server with multi-megabytes sized files and was able to offload bulk and bandwidth. It seemed like a win-win.
The downside was that when something went wrong, repairing the links and attempting to salvage the files became a challenge as times changed. For example, I posted many of my original videos along with a few encoded television snippets (don’t do it) to YouTube, only to find my account was shut down and all the video content including my own personal videos removed … no appeal …no warning. They were just removed due to the complaint of a copyright infringement (Oprah has clout, even though the snippet and links all pointed back to her 2009 program).
For Flickr, they were purchased by Yahoo and changed some of their terms and linking … breaking some of the links to images that I used on my blog. My final lesson was the demise of Posterous in 2012. It was shut down after the acquisition by Twitter and with plenty of warning, eliminated every post. Unfortunately I used Posterous as my mobile blogging setup which posted both to Posterous and my blog by email (from my phone). Thankfully I was provided and downloaded an archive unfortunately all the links were broken and file names changed … so each post much be manually corrected and images saved – tedious and hardly worth the effort (although I occasional fix a few).
Lesson: If you host your own blog, try to control most if not all of your own content, and then back everything up regularly.
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