A (Reluctant) New Look

I've been writing Straddling the Gap for over six years.  I have lots of posts with recipes and patterns and craft projects.  I have lots of posts of places I have visited and family events.  I use lots of photos.  I've been on vacation all this week and returned to write about a dessert recipe my daughter and I created, only to find lots of these:

When I started writing this blog, I was hosting my photos with, you guessed it, Photobucket.  That included a photo pattern that was the background for my entire blog design.  UGH.  If you haven't heard about this scam, for years Photobucket has been hosting pictures, most of which were subsequently used on blogs, Ebay, Etsy and other sites requiring photos.  They have always provided URL links (in several formats) for each photo, so 3rd party hosting was ALWAYS part of the appeal.  This week, without warning (at least to this 10+ year customer), Photobucket decided to change a free service to a $500/year service.  What?!?  So, if you are visiting older blog posts (mine or others) or just older websites, you might be seeing a lot of this image.  (I still hope they will change their corporate minds and I will find a pretty picture of a magnolia here someday.)

I decided maybe it is time for a new look, so I did a quick reconfigure of my blog template.  I wish that was the only thing needing a fix.  Unfortunately, some of my content included pictures hosted on Photobucket that I now must manually retrieve, download to my computer and upload to Blogger.  I was actually pretty surprised, because I haven't visited this Photobucket account in a long time and haven't been using it for more recent posts.  So, I will be updating a lot of classic posts and reposting them.  While I really don't want to go through this process, maybe it just proves that not everything lasts forever on the internet.

cindy