johnsmachines

The thought of losing 1025 posts which are a diary of important aspects of my life, was just too awful to contemplate.

So WordPress has me by a sensitive part of my anatomy. I have paid my subscription for another year.

I have made a painful decision to delete posts year by year, starting 2014, until I have enough storage space to start posting again.

But before I delete anything I am going to save the text and photographs of the posts, starting with 2014.

NO BIG DEAL YOU THINK.

WordPress makes a big feature of how easy it is to save old posts. But I have tried it, and it is not straight forward. Maybe it is easier on the Business Plan, but on my “Premium Plan” I have tied multiple times to save the 2014 posts and photos without success. I contacted the WordPress AI for assistance.

Easy it said. Just go to Tools – Export – download – unzip the file – open the file and Bob’s your uncle.

Well, 3 days later I gave up, despite the instructions from the AI. It was incredibly complicated, messy, and the downloaded files was full of useless meta data. All that I wanted was my text, comments, and the photos. The videos has been deleted several years ago.

Eventually I said to the AI “why cant I just save the posts as PDF files?” Of course you can do that said the AI. How do I do that?

“Just open the post, right click on it, and press control P. Then save it as a PDF”.

(well, why the F didn’t you say that in the first place!!)

So, I have saved and deleted the first 1+ years of posts and photos, and I am no longer getting rude messages from WordPress about exceeding my storage limits. 2014 posts gone (but saved to my own computer), 2015 going, and probably 2016 as well.

So johnsmachines.com gets another reprieve.