This is some advice I should have taken awhile ago, but hey, I’m using it now, so I’m sharing. Okie dokie?

Hmm, am enjoying a hazelnut latte right now, and unlimited bandwidth at my local M&B right now, because I know you all missed me like mad right?  Okay, here goes.

• Be hard on your email inbox:  Do you really need all those newsletters? I must have cancelled about 12 email subscriptions that I wasn’t really reading anyway. Sure it’s nice to log in to the internet, and see that you have 19 unread messages, but honestly if you’re deleting most of those because they don’t really add value to your life, they’re wasting your bandwidth.  I don’t want to name any sites here, because I still like browsing them, but I don’t need them blasting me with information everyday.  A lot of them are graphics intensive too, so if you’re not willing to relinquish them (or their hold on you) then at least set your computer to not download the pictures automatically until you know for sure if you want to see them or not.

• I’ve decided to stop browsing for property in Australia until we know for sure which city we’ll be settling in. We’ve narrowed it down to two, and it will depend on the job offers that hubby gets as to where we go, and even though we have a preference between the two (although if push comes to shove, either one is fine), I’m not going to keep getting daily email updates on available properties (sometimes 4x a day) until I know where we’re going for sure. I know pretty much what’s in the market place, and what the price ranges are now, so I can leave it for awhile.

• If you’re building a super hot blog (yes that would be me) and you’re absolutely *taken* with every plugin and widget on offer to make it flashy, fun and informative, don’t refresh your page every single time you make a change. This is particularly appropriate if you’re making 3-4 changes every hour   It will be okay. You don’t need to worry about losing readers (yeah, all 6 of you) if something is out of place for a second. You will have time to fix it. Try to only load your own page once or twice a day to either check your html is working and not f*cking up the whole page, or to re-read your own pithy, witty humourous post for the day, to check for spelling errors of course.  Your widgets are there for others, not for your own amusement. Really they’re not.

• In the same vein, while you want to have the coolest sidebar ever, you don’t need *every* single widget available for the wordpress platform.  Try to limit yourself to the essential, stuff.  A few fun things are fine, but if you overdo it, it wastes bandwidth, and worse, makes your page slower to load, which of course will drive away potential new readers.

• Photographs. This is a tough one. I try to use flickr as an online storage vault. A lot of my stuff is there for safekeeping, a sort of back up in case something happens to my macbook (of course nothing would happen to my mac, but it may get stolen), and most of it I’ve marked as private, so it’s not even visible to everyone anyway. Now this is the toughie. I take hi-res photos. They’re at least 2mb each. I really don’t want to upload anything less than full res, because I may want to enlarge these later.  I have to be really hard on this, and I’ve decided to upload reduced res if I know for sure that it’s a photo that is only going to appear on my blog for instance. Otherwise I simply link to the image in flickr anyway (hey I pay for the storage so I figure its okay).

• If, like me, you have an internet package that offers you 5 hours a month of unmetered bandwidth, then use this time (right now I’m uploading an entire book to blurb…(check them out they totally rock), to do all your major uploads.  Or better yet, if you live in the US, you can mail in a cd to most of the photo storage sites, like Shutterfly, or Snapfish.  In fact even postage from South Africa is cheaper than the time you’d pay potentially out of your bandwidth used at home.  Of course some of these sites have local alternatives, Snapfish for example have UK and Aussie branches. So there ya go.

• Facebook. Oy. Vey. Unless I’m looking for someone, or replying to someone, again, I do not need to sit and refresh the page incessantly to see what’s up. I only need to update my status once a day at most. Unlike my sweet fellow photographer friend who updates like every 20 seconds.  But then, her bandwidth package is like 10 times the size of mine, so go her

• I use Google Reader as my RSS reader, and I started using it, because I was tired of loading peoples pages, only to see they hadn’t updated – total waste of time and bandwidth – there’s a small saving. But I find myself bored with the mundane black and white interface, and I end up loading everyone’s page anyway. But what I’m forcing myself to do now – is only load that persons page if I have a comment already formulating in my head.  Otherwise it’s scan and let scan, and move on. Brutal.

• I’m not even going to get started on iTunes etc because guess what? We don’t have access to the iTunes store here in South Africa, because there is a monopoly by local music company’s to block it – and of course they charge up to 4x as much for the same music. Call me cranky, but I ain’t buyin’.

I wish I didn’t have to take some of these measures, but the fact is, I would struggle to live without the internet, it’s my lifeblood. It excites me, it’s my entertainment, my education, my medicine, and my quiet place.  But the sad fact is that internet access in this damn country is grossly overpriced and if like me you need the mobility of wifi (or in my case 3G) it’s even worse.

Operators here try to make a buck out of EVERYONE. However, we have a new national operator starting up soon (in fact they’re already available in Johannesburg), they should be available in Cape Town in the next few months (I saw some guys laying cables under the road the other day with a sign saying ‘Neotel at work’ and I was so happy that I actually waved at them).

Right now I pay R499 for a 2Gig monthly package. That’s roughly $63 US a month for relatively slowish access, slow by global standards anyway. Neotel – the new operator are going to be offering an UNLIMITED service for R999. (About $125) Which includes a voip phone, and wireless router for the house.  When they finally release here, depending on whether or not they rope you into a 24 month contract or not, hubby and I want to go for it.  If a contract is required then we just have to lump it with our current package until we leave.  But oh, for the freedom of unlimited access.

The mind…she boggles.

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