Sometimes "Free" is too expensive.

Where in I muse upon the difference betwixt "price" and "cost".

My domain registration included free blog space and software, so I figured it would be a good place to start out when I set up my blog last year. I mean, hey, I had already paid for the domain, so why not take advantage of something that was being thrown in for nothing?

So, I worked on setting up the blog. The software wasn't exactly intuitive, but a certain amount of annoyance is to be expected with free. I struggled through it, and got things under way.

Meanwhile, life happens, and the blog lies fallow for a while. This downtime illustrated that the anti-spam software wasn't particularly useful: almost 700 spam comments on two posts over the past year. Ugh. The last straw was when I tried to embed a video in the page, and found that the feature was (and has been) broken for a good year or so. Double ugh.

In short: Hello, Blogger. I'm going to try and get my old content over here while I set up the new blog as I'm quite eager to shutter the old one and have my site point here.

Which brings me back around to my initial musing. I'm price-concious with regards to my equipment, but sometimes I lose sight of the fact that something that's cheap will end up costing me way more than just cash in the long run. A free blog host is nice and all, but not if the functionality is going to waste an even more valuable commodity, my time. Money is limited: time, moreso.

What's worse, a badly made service (or instrument, program, the list goes on and on) can add an abundance of frustration to the mix, which makes the possibility of dropping a project in disgust uncomfortably high. It's easier (and a lot more fun) to get around knowledge based limitations; if I don't know how to do something, I can learn it and return later. If my equipment itself is getting in the way, it can cause insurmountable problems down the road.

Anyway, that's more than enough about a silly blog host. Time to get rolling!