Randomize

Nat Torkington writes six basic truths about free APIs.

The most basic truth, as the late Robert Heinlein said, “there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.”

This is why I don’t use external hosting for my blog or my photography, I use my own machine. The only true “My Space” is the one you pay for.

I did struggle with this a few weeks ago, though, when I decided to start using the Flickr APIs to host some of the photos on my site. RoadRunner has a decent upstream connection, but it just wasn’t enough to reasonably transfer the high-quality 800×600 photos (150-250KiB).

Fortunately, Flickr also offers a “pro” account with unlimited bandwidth and photo hosting, so I’m relatively confident that the API will be around for awhile and I’ll be treated as a customer, not an eyeball. I made the switch a few days ago and I’ve been very happy with the quality of the API and the new speed of my home page.

_Footnote: yes, this is my first blog in a *long* time again. Between business travel, photography, and life, I’ve just been too busy. I did finally create a semi-promising script to transfer my old blog contents into a form WordPress can import, but haven’t had the time yet to migrate the content and set up some massive modrewrite script to forward old links. I can dig up old articles if anyone is interested, but the best way is to send me an email, I don’t remember to moderate the comments here often.

Update 2009-05: In the interest of full disclosure, I’m now using an external site to host my photos. Turns out Flickr API was just too cumbersome to deal with, and Zenfolio offers great e-commerce integration and password-protected galleries for print orders.

Update 2017-01: A year or so ago I switched back to hosting my own photo galleries (via a .NET Core web service and PostgreSql), and I’ve transitioned my blog from WordPress to a static site generated using Hugo. I got tired of constantly dealing with WordPress security updates, and you can’t get much more secure than hosting static files.