After year Two - and a half

Happy delayed celebration!

Celebration … but a bit late. And you know what? I didn’t forget it, but I was doing a major change to this blog thingy. Maybe you noticed the new url? Well that's not just for finding a cooler name but has a reason. But let me explain everything from the start.

Just a gallery

Beginning of 2026 I came up with the idea to have a gallery of finished projects. There are many pages that contain my photos like Instagram, puttyandpaint or recently thebaselair, but they don't have the charm of a gallery with just finished projects and the right amount of photos per project. They have WIPs in between or other posts.

Now I didn’t want to create a webpage for that with a regular cost just for showing my hobby stuff. So I fiddled around with blogger and actually found a way to create a page that matched my idea by digging deep in css and views.

At that time I was in vacation without wifi and when testing my gallery I wondered why it was so slow at loading the images. And when all of a sudden my mobile data limit was reached ( in Germany I have a limit of 10GB of mobile data per month on my current contract ), I saw the light.

 

About Data size

Every image was about 2-5Mb, that takes quite a while to load and a gallery of 30 Images drains your data.

After some research I learned that a good web page compresses their images to kilobyte sizes and sets an appropriate image width.

What to do with that?

That meant, all my posts have sub-optimal images and I planned to replace them which is quite some effort on 30+ posts with ~10 images each. With such a huge change, I could even turn the big wheel and change whatever is needed.

For example I always had trouble with Google indexing my page so that it couldn’t be found in the search engine. I never found out why, but when I started blogging I had some renaming and deletion of pages, maybe that didn't please the Google search engine and I was blocked? Who knows.

Now I don't expect any huge traffic on my blog - as said in the beginning, it's more a kind of diary. But it feels weird when you type the exact name of the blog and it doesn’t appear on google.

Fresh start

That's why I created a complete new blog and move all the content with proper formatted images and a beautiful gallery - which took me a quarter of a year. But you know what - it worked!

 

Googling for Mike rockhouse shows up in the search and even on the first results page. Oh, and did I mention the reworked project page and fact sheets? It received quite a rework with my new CSS skills (-;

But I also see all this image processing costs a bit of extra time when posting and keeping the pace of the first year with 20+ posts is not in scope anymore.

 

 

Upcoming

For the next half year I don’t plan big stuff, just catch up with posts. I want to focus a bit on the more recent projects and aim for posting all 2026 project in 2026 and catch up with older stuff step by step. Let's see next year if it worked out.