Sorry For The Mess

In the next few weeks I will doing some housekeeping on Must Hike Must Eat that may result in missing images on posts and pages. I use BlueHost to host my website and despite paying an outrageous amount of money at the beginning of the year to cover the next three years, they have increased their pricing (again) and this will result in a doubling of fees on November 1st for my website due to its size. I understand price increases. I do not understand taking more money for a three contract I can’t get out of when they jack their prices. I refuse to pay them another $400 dollars and they won’t let me out of the three year contract I already paid for.

My website uses a lot of space and that puts it into the “business” plan, even though I do not make anything from this website. I believe that the reason my site uses so much space is all the images it contains. Since Must Hike Must Eat’s inception in 2016, I have added A LOT of images to this website. I take too many pictures! Some are visible when you look at posts and pages, and some are stored in the Media section behind the scenes. I fully admit over the years I have been lazy in uploading images and there are many that are duplicate or not used at all. But to make matters worse, WordPress has made multiple copies of all the images I have uploaded in different sizes, as many as 10-15! All in the name of being mobile-friendly, etc. And then, of course, BlueHost saves another billion copies themselves. There is no way to remove the unnecessary ones individually so drastic measures are needed.

So as I attempt to whittle the site down in hopes of not having to pay more money (at least until 2026 when I can kiss BlueHost good-bye), you will see posts and pages with missing images until I can figure out how to add them back more smaller and selectively and/or how to house the images on another server. WordPress has a function where I can select images that are “unattached” and delete them. I know this means they are not attached to the front of posts and pages, but it is possible they are attached in the galleries that many of those pages hold. This is going to be easier than going one by one through the over 1000 posts and pages on the site. Ain’t nobody got time for that. But even that will only get rid of so many images. I know, the pictures are a big part of the site….

The truth is that this year I have been working on how to simply this website anyway and turn it back into the blog it used to be, and this may just be one step in that direction!

Wish me luck…

Editor’s note: I have dropped from over 23,000 images to less than 400 on the website. Deleted about 100 superfluous posts (Google can bite it). All the comments, anything extraneous. The cuts were painful. But, all the writing and information is still here. This is going to allow me to copy only those pieces to another location without dealing with all the images. The plan will be to slowly add back images in a different way that will allow the site to stay “small” on the server.

Another Editor’s Note: So of course while I am in the middle of all the chaos, Outside Magazine reaches out because they want to share one of my recipes online. Of course, right? So if you are new here through them, welcome to my mess.

Me, again: as of 12/31/2023 I believe I have restored 2327 images to all 831 posts and pages on the website. As you can seem they did not all come back because I intend to have more videos than photos moving forward, particularly around outdoor adventures. They won’t be fancy but will be beautiful. You can find an example on Rockwall Trail: Kootenay National Park. Look for more to come.

Thank you so much for stopping by Must Hike Must Eat!

If you need some healthy eating inspiration start here:..

Recipe Index

Need some eating out suggestions when friends want to stop after a hike? I have a Pacific Northwest Eating Guide here.

Find out what’s been happening outside the blog:

If you have a question you don’t want to post in the comments, you can ask them here:

Contact Me