One downside to a CLI setup

Is not knowing when someone is dumping ads, instead of your images, into your site. I realize now that my ongoing (and it is still ongoing) battle to trim out the links to xs.to was only exacerbated by the fact that I have been relying primarily on a text-only browser for months now. The image link tags that elinks displayed were the same, regardless of what the image was. So I suppose, in that extrapolated sense, there is a (rather weak) downside to using a console-only system — someone could be polluting your blog with ads, and you wouldn’t be able to tell. 🙄

I have learned my lesson though. I used that service for a couple of years, and while it wasn’t uncommon for a picture to expire over time, I realize that there are quite a few still-useful posts on here that are besotted with advertisements for someone else’s site, hovering in my archives. Posts that linked to imageshack.us or to a few other sites seem to have held their thumbnails at least, which is preferable to getting a giant ad, smack gob in the center of the page.

But I am willing to take the responsibility for this. There are lots of options available to me, and WordPress.com’s native image hosting is probably my best bet. I resent the lightbox effect-riddled, Flash-driven image uploader (and the standard file uploader isn’t much better), but it’s probably the most reliable option. And there’s gobs of space available nowadays, so that is not an issue either.

Regardless, I continue to carve away at posts from years back, a little each day. If you find one I missed, or find a post of particular value that is missing its screenshots, please let me know. If there are too many missing, as was the case with the X-based software and GTK1.2-based software pages, I just have to move on, and hope what I wrote is enough. On the other hand, howtos, like the one on vectorizing images in Inkscape, still get around 50 visitors a day, and I would be disappointed if someone turned away from the page because it was splattered with ads. 😐