Insect Picture of the Day

Some folks have asked me why I let InsectPOD go into hibernation. The answer is complicated, but to sum it up:

1. I had hoped to be able to monetize InsectPOD enough to pay for hosting and perhaps a little extra to save up for better camera and/or computer equipment. After 18 months of investing 20-100 hours a month into InsectPOD, and counting the $1.00 that my mom donated to test the donation button, InsectPOD made a grand total of $0.66. (Paypal kept $0.34 of Mom’s donation.)
2. The server hosting situation went from bad to worse to completely borked at a point in my life when I didn’t have time to fix servers. The hardware was fine and I had some access to some great sysadmin help, but between weird timing errors and configuration problems I finally just threw in the towel.
3. I broke my camera.
4. (And I’m not even considering here JFargo’s herculean effort to keep the site going through all this hassle. I am VERY grateful to him for his help there. Fate was pretty determined to knock InsectPOD down, however, and did so by blowing up his computer.)

The monetization aspect was frustrating, and server hassles were aggravating, and though I was coping it was steadily wearing me down. The final straw came when I broke my camera. As I held the pieces in my hands, I suddenly realized how very, very tired I was of all the hassles dragging InsectPOD down. I decided that the best thing would be to take a break for a few days… which turned into weeks and then months, and now here we are.

When I borrowed Mom’s camera last weekend, it reminded me how much fun actually doing InsectPOD was: the photography, the research, the blogging… it’s like a very happy piece of me had been found, and I didn’t even know it had been lost until that moment.

I may have to reconsider this retirement thing altogether.