I guess I deserve that for putting so many eggs in one questionable basket.

Back in 2008, I discovered Viddler, a site for sharing videos. For some reason I’ve long since forgotten, I decided that it was a better way to host my blog’s video content. I embraced it and uploaded dozens of videos to Viddler, embedding them in blog posts. I even went a step farther and wrote articles explaining to other WordPress uses how they could embed their Viddler videos in their blog posts.

Silly me.

Earlier this year, Viddler pulled the plug on all of its free accounts. Because I hadn’t used the service for so long, they did not have an up-to-date email address for me and I did not get notification of the change. As a result, I was unable to retrieve copies of my videos from their service. Now, if I want them, I have to pay a fee.

Yes, I have to pay a fee to get copies of my own videos from their service.

Needless to say, I’m not paying.

Understand that I don’t make a penny on this blog. I removed all the advertising years ago and don’t even ask for donations anymore. My hosting fees are low enough that I don’t mind footing the bill for that, but I simply can’t pay for additional services — like those offered for a fee now by Viddler. I need to stick to low-cost or free alternatives for anything related to my blog.

A total of 65 of my blog posts contain references to Viddler and/or embedded Viddler content — including “video blog posts” I was creating back in 2009. I’ll be spending some time today editing these posts to remove the bad embedding code. I suspect I’ll wind up simply deleting a lot of these posts in their entirety.

There are two valuable lessons to be learned here:

• Keep copies of all of your content. I know I have copies of the “lost videos” somewhere, but they’re likely packed with the rest of my office stuff. Or maybe they aren’t. Who knows? The point is, uploading them to a service isn’t necessarily any way to assure that they’ll always be available.
• Stick to services that aren’t likely to change payment policies. YouTube has become the go-to service for sharing video for a reason: it’s free and it will remain free forever. In addition, being a part of a big company like Google makes it unlikely that it’ll shut down or be sold anytime soon. New services spring up all the time and they often seem like good alternatives for one reason or another. But will they stick around forever? And maintain their current cost policies?

At this point, anyone who has been involved in technology for at least 10 years can likely list several online services that have disappeared or changed policies. Viddler is one of the latest. It’s unfortunate that I relied on them the way I did.