31-3.6 Time, money and desk space

I started this daft writing project with ideas of fighting complacency. It’s too easy to slip into habits in your blogging, to just keep doing what you did before, without any serious attempt to keep pushing yourself forwards. And, in a sense, I’ve been scuppered for two days by taking exactly that approach to my technology.

I’ve been using Movable Type to blog here for over a decade now, and I’ve been on a single webhost for the majority of that time – since 2007, in fact. Now, I’m seriously reconsidering that decision. The past 48 hours have not covered my webhost in glory. They killed my blog software – and then my whole account – with no clear explanation. It took them 24 hours to resolve a photo uploading problem once the site was restored – and they broke the site several times in the meantime.

And, to cap it all, they gave me utterly wrong information at one point – telling me that I was using very old software (which is true, if your definition of “very old” is two months), which is unmaintained (not true) and therefore my site was “probably hacked”. Well, suspending my account because it was “probably hacked’ is one thing, although the “probably” is a bit worrying; surely you should check before pulling down sites? Doing it without notification is another.

Migration Labour

So, now I find myself wondering if I should migrate this blog to another of my hosting accounts – and that’s another level of work that’ll consume time I can ill-afford right now.

But then, I’ve also been reminded today how much technology does move on when you’re not paying attention. It’s been over a decade since I bought a printer. That one was on its last legs back in 2008, so I switched it for my late mother’s printer when she passed away. That printer has been faithfully serving us every since, but I finally made the decision to do away with it earlier in the year, as the ink prices for it were getting out of hand. When the current cartridges died – it was being replaced. And that happened earlier in the week. This morning, a Canon Pixma 6450 arrived – and it has been a revelation.

Two become one (tech edition)

First of all, it’s replacing two devices. Both my old printer and scanner are exiting, with one device taking their place. Welcome back, desk space.

Also, it connects to my wireless network – and, joy of joys, it supports AirPrint, which means I can print from my iPad and iPhone. It was quite something to tap the sharing button I’ve never used on my iPhone – the one marked “print” – and see a page pop out of the printer a few seconds later. What was more impressive was loading up some 6×4 photo paper and seeing a perfect little print popping out.

And then I realised how much time I wasted getting prints from Boots and those little printing kiosks when sending letters of thanks to people who bought Hazel clothes. This printer is capable of producing just as good results, faster, and without leaving home. The price is not much different. Sticking with that old printer was a false economy, in terms of the time/money trade off. I should have done this a while ago.

Time poor, cash… OK

Mentally, I’ve never quote made the journey from “time rich, cash poor” to “time starved, cash comfortable”. I still make decisions based on saving money not time – but since Hazel came along, time has been at an absolute premium, and I’m not yet making sensible decisions about how to deploy my money to ease that time pressure a little.

Am I paying too little for my web hosting – and suffering huge losses of time as a result? Would some sensible investment in hosting and a managed move to WordPress pay off in the long run? Where else in my life is corner-cutting costing me precious time? These are questions I need to be asking with more rigour – and focus.