I started using WordPress.com (on a different account) in December 2012. At that time I was also messing with an app that doesn’t exist anymore, Posterous.
Posterous was a cross posting, email uploading bliss machine. You setup an account and it gave you an email address. Sending emails to that address would convert them into blog posts. You could send text and images and… video? I can’t remember for sure about video, but definitely images. Then you could link your account to other blog hosting sites, like Blogger and WordPress.com, and your Posterous blog posts would be cross posted to the other hosts. It was pretty cool. After a while Twitter bought them out and then folded them up (at least that’s what I heard).
The end of Posterous created exactly the problem I was thinking about in a post a couple of days ago. What happens if I host all of my images at Flickr and Flickr goes under? I would have a blog chock full of broken image links. I actually already have that because a ton of posts from 2012 or so had images hosted at Posterous and those images are long gone.
Last night I started a mini project, trying to figure out which images I had used in those posts and replacing the broken links with Flickr links. I was able to use the Camera Roll page on my Flickr account to match up the dates of the blog posts and see what pictures were taken on those days. In most of the posts I looked at I was able to figure out which image to use based on either the text of the post or sometimes just the title.
I started with the creation of my first WordPress.com account and after a few weeks of use the image hosting seems to have changed from Posterous to WordPress. Those images links were never broken. I am not sure how long I was using Posterous to post to Blogger, so I have to look backward in time from the start of WordPress too. I just haven’t done that yet.
I also noticed that there are a lot of images hosted by Google. They were pics I uploaded to Blogger using their mobile app. I had a public and a private blog back then and I kept using Blogger for the private one for a while after I stopped using it for the public page. Posterous was public so I wasn’t using that service for private stuff. Those links still work too. Maybe there aren’t as many dead images as I thought there were.
It’s kinda cool to look backward in time though. I mean, what else is keeping a blog for?
Inside the Red Head's Head 