Space

No, not the Classic kind, nor even the Final Frontier kind. This post is about elbow room. Place to put stuff. Digital Lebensraum.

Unless you want to pay WordPress for extra space, you only get a certain amount of room for uploading pictures. While this is no picayune amount and other people seem to have photoblogs that have been running for years, I’m currently at about 87% of capacity on my free WordPress-provided media folder.

Obviously, I can’t keep doing what I’m doing indefinitely.

One option would be to delete a whole load of the early archives and free up space that way. I guess that might at some point go beyond recommended to necessity, but I’d rather not do that if I can avoid it. I like having at least a partial record of my LEGO creative ability over the years. There’s a large chunk of time in which I was building but used LEGO.com as my primary display outlet, but as a personal archive this is pretty good.

I first got this blog right after I returned to LEGO building as an adult, when I used MLCad for building practically everything because my supplies of LEGO bricks were that paltry. Back then I was clueless; not only did I not know about all of the AFOL sites, I hadn’t even discovered LEGO’s own site! I got a blog as a way to showcase my MLCad creations (because I couldn’t think of another way of doing it). I never really liked using MLCad all that much, though; like a lot of old LEGO CAD-type programs its build interface is tricky to work and feels a lot more like using a program than building with bricks.

Then I discovered TLG’s own LEGO Digital Designer (LDD) program, which is a lot more user-friendly and easy to work with, and which TLG have done a particularly good job of making feel a lot like real building.

LDD, however, has certain annoying features for AFOLs, such as the program itself tending to want to decide what orientation a brick ought to be placed in, and not letting you do things that you know you could make work in real life. Trying to make tracks work is particularly futile in the program, especially the Technic kind made up of individual links (I gave up), and I remember long frustrating hours of trying to get its bendable hose bender to actually bend hoses the way any reasonable real-bricks builder can do in two seconds. Also its instruction-generator is complete pants. On the rare occasions I’ve tried it out it’s worked exactly backwards from the intuitive way any reasonable builder would do things. I’m still looking for a LEGO CAD-type program that combines LDD’s ease-of-use and overall real-bricks feel with a decent instruction-generator and full AFOL connectivity. And a decent gravity generator, while I’m wishing, so you know when your balljointed supermech isn’t going to be able to support itself.

Anyway, as my brick inventory grew I found myself switching more and more completely to real bricks, so that these days I almost wouldn’t dream of building a digital model. It takes too long and it’s less enjoyable.

It was in discovering LEGO.com and its now-defunct Galleries (and its even-longer-defunct Message Boards) that I discovered LDD, so it’s mostly that period where my blogging got really sporadic. I do have the sort of personality that favours one-stop-shops where I can post my creations, talk about them, develop backstories and connect with fellow LEGO enthusiasts, and the old LEGO website had all of that (which its current-incarnation LEGO Life app lacks in even remotely the same degree). Apparently unable to make MOCPages work for me (my creation pictures would say they were uploading, but then disappear into the aether and never appear in a list of BBCode image codes to actually insert the things into a post) and feeling like digital models were frowned on over there anyway, I made my digital home at LEGO.com and let this blog mostly languish.

Some time later, though, in 2016 if I’m remembering right, I remembered this blog and decided to make more of a go of it. As I’ve mentioned on here before, LEGO.com was a great site in a lot of ways, but it suffers (for an AFOL) from being full of kids and far fewer older TFOLs and AFOLs. It took me a while to feel like I needed more mature LEGO contact and critique, but feel it I did.

Still unable to get what was then the premier AFOL creation-posting site (ie MOCPages) to work for me, I gave up and just used my blog. It has all of LEGO.com and MOCPages’ storytelling capacity, and there’s a way to upload pictures of my creations that’s easy to use and will actually work for me, unlike MOCPages which still doesn’t no matter what browser or web software I try to use. Literally, God has kept me from MOCPages.

So I’ve been merrily creating and blogging ever since. Traffic is pretty low normally, but I’ve made steps more recently to try and at least partially overcome the lack of visibility: I’ve gone on Pinterest.

Not what I’d like to use as a sole medium for sharing, because due to the way it works you don’t have to originate something to pin it. But as a publicity adjunct it sort of works. Provided you pin other people’s stuff as well.

Now, however, I’m looking at a new kind of space problem. I’m running out of media room on my WordPress blog. Soon I’m not going to be able to upload any more pictures of my creations.

My other, older blog has never had this problem, but it’s a discursive, wordy blog with few pictures. A LEGO MOCmaking blog is necessarily going to have more in the way of imagery.

I don’t want to pay WordPress for more media space. I’m in favour of “as cheaply as possible”, for the most part. And I don’t want to delete a load of my earlier work to free up space. But I’m at 87% capacity. I’ve got to do something. Individual photo jpeg files aren’t huge, but I have a lot of them, and the problem is only going to get worse, because I’m not sropping my building.

I could start a new blog, a “son of Square Feet”, but sooner or later I’m going to run into the same deal, and closing and reopening a blog isn’t what I’m after either.

What I needed, I decided, was some way to host images externally to the blog.

Something like Flickr, in fact.

I’ve thought about Flickr as a display medium before now. It has a large community of mostly AFOL builders on it, but I’ve always wanted more storytelling capacity than Flickr gives you, so I’ve gone with other routes for posting.

As a picture-hosting service for this blog, though… Well, that’s its primary function, right? Picrture hosting?

Honestly, I’m really slow on the uptake sometimes, but a New Year is a great time to try new things, so I’m experimenting with a Flickr account.

I don’t have to delete anything or change anything. I don’t have to quit building or quit blogging. I don’t even have to make a new blog and archive this one.

Over time, I may find myself connecting with the vast Flickr-based LEGO horde, but it doesn’t strike me as much of a community in the way that other sites do. But we shall see. The images of both my Toothless model and my rocket, Rocket, ROCKET!!! were posted on Flickr, so I now have a presence in that demi-chaotic stream of images. I’ve resurrected my old LEGO.com handle SaurianSpacer for use over there, if you want to look me up.

If the experiment is successful I might quadruple my exposure overnight. At the very least, I have a nearly bottomless new Pit of Carkoon to store my creations in. A whole terabyte. Mwahahahaha!