I have added a new section to this site. It’s called “Photos”. And guess what? It features photos. As many of you already know, Flickr did the whole switcheroo recently, forcing Old Skool members to merge their accounts with a Yahoo ID. Both Tobyjoe and I were a little perturbed by this, admittedly. And apparently it made a lot of the Internet foam at the mouth. We did not foam at the mouth, but we did whine about it to one another for a few minutes.

And before anyone gets all, “You’re just mad because you’re no longer considered ‘Old Skool’ like I’m wrapped up in the whole ‘I listened to Nirvana before they became popular, back in their Bleach days’”, I couldn’t care less about being considered Old Skool.

I’m going to talk about why the switch bothered me and then I’m never going to write about again. OK? Ready?

I have (and use) an existing Yahoo email. So I have nothing against Yahoo contrary to what a lot of folks are accusing us naysayers of. (Although, I did receive some comment spam recently on Flickr on several of my New York Post pictures, which is just completely lame to say the least.) I have had a Yahoo email address since 1998, maybe sooner. I use it when I’m buying something and I don’t want to receive spam every day from the merchant. I use it when our email goes down, which is like, never. I use it sometimes when dealing with clients, sending resumes, especially if they are behind some wicked firewall and have issues getting messages from my regular email. I never receive any personal email there. Basically, I have one email address I use for clients (on top of the Yahoo account), one for friends and family, one for blog stuff (a catch-all for anyone to use), and one for pretty much every other Web site we manage and run (Self-Portrait Day, I Hate Design, etc.) Between Tobyjoe and myself, we have a LOT of Web sites. We also host several Web sites, all, of which, require a unique username and password.

When you couple all those Web sites and email accounts with WordPress, Akismet, TypePad (for leaving comments on other blogs), online banking, financial stuff, client FTPs, Blog admin, etc. and you have yourself a whole bunch of passwords and a whole mess of usernames. With the whole Flickr thing, I would have liked to have merged my previous Yahoo account with my existing Flickr account, but that Yahoo account is already tied to another Flickr account that I signed up for about 2 months ago (before they made the announcement) in order to upload some photographs for a client. (As mentioned before, I like to keep work away from the personal as much as humanly possible.) In the end, I was forced to sign up again with Yahoo in order to merge the accounts together, and since mihow was already taken by some impostor I had to get creative, using numbers and underscores. This added yet another username/password combination to the already lengthy list. And I’m getting a little tired of it. I’m getting tired of having to sign up everywhere all the time.

But the whole two accounts thing with Yahoo doesn’t bother me the most. What bothers me the most is that when I am signed in at Flickr using my mihow account and I log into Yahoo using my previous email (the one I signed up with in the late 90s), Flickr kicks me out and I have to sign in again. Basically, I can’t be signed into both accounts at the same time, which is slightly frustrating for a gal who’s already grumpy and pregnant.

I know I don’t have to be online all the time, that no one was forcing me to sign up all over the place, use Flickr, etc. I know that. I realize I spend entirely too much time on the Internet and I’m hoping that once the baby arrives I will find other ways to amuse myself, like, by becoming its mother. But right now it’s cold and I’m not feeling 100% and when I’m not working, watching TV, or reading, I enjoy being online.

I’m not leaving Flickr. I like Flickr. I like seeing what my friends are up to, strangers, too. But the jury is still out on whether or not I’ll give them another 24 dollars in order to become “pro” again. If I had to decide right now, I probably wouldn’t. Now that I’m using Mephisto, and can easily upload photographs to my blog without even opening an FTP program, I am more inclined to move pictures back over to mihow.com in lieu of using Flickr to host them.

And that brings me back to square one, which is the reason I am writing today. I have created a new section called “Photos” where I hope to upload images as frequently as I once had on Flickr. We’ll see how it goes.

Oh, and one more thing, I reserve the right to hypocrisy when it comes to this topic in the future. :]