Instagram

40 Posts to the End?

I joined Instagram in early 2018 as a way to kind of recreate a photo of the day blog I had back in the very early 2000’s. I wasn’t really thinking of it as a social media thing. So much so that that first post didn’t have a caption of any kind and nary a hashtag. Slowly I started to add captions, descriptions and hash tags, but I still really wasn’t using it as a “social Media” platform. I started following some accounts and started gaining followers, but I was not doing a lot of commenting. I was only liking photos that I actually liked, not just automatically liking something because because the follower was liking everything I posted.

Slowly over time Instagram has added more and more ads and has tried to become more of a video site instead of a photo one. Now every third post in my feed is a photo from some influencer I don’t follow or video of some sort or an ad for something. Bleh. I’m thinking that I’m going just quit the ‘Gram.

From that first Instagram post in February 2018 until yesterday, or 1,990 days, I have posted 1,960 pictures (pretty close to one a day.) The number 2,000 seems like a nice round number for my last IG post. I could do it ten days from today, but then the post count will be 1,9xx, so I’ll wait until I get an even 2,000 posts and then quit.

I’ll still leave my account there though in case someone I’m actually friends with wants to DM me. Also, because Donna uses it to look at a couple of accounts that she’s interested in too. Maybe I’ll create a second account with no posts at all just so I can click on explore and waste some idle time.

Best Nine Redux

Its that time of year again – time to show off your most liked Instagram pictures. I posted about this two years ago when I used an app called Best Nine, but for some reason I didn’t do it last year. Maybe because that particular app is no longer available…

There is an app called Top Nine, but that is iPhone only. Searching the Google Play Store for “top nine” or “best nine” lands you on an app called Nine Grid Photo – Grid Maker which does basically the same thing. The app has a stunningly low rating of 1.2 out of 5 with reviews complaining about everything from not working at all to returning bogus results to too many ads.

I agree with the ad thing, but it worked flawlessly for me. It also let me go back all the way to 2018, so below are the last five years of my most like Instagram posts:

Update: I just tried the Nine Grid Photo – Grid Maker again and it wouldn’t do anything but show me the two images I have posted so far this year with a heading of 2022. Maybe it warrants those low ratings. I’ve deleted the app and we’ll see what happens next year.

Jigsaw Puzzle Madness

As I mentioned the other day, we have been doing a lot of jigsaw puzzles here during pandemic quarantine/avoidance and smoky summer days.

We have probably bought a couple of dozen brand new. We visit our local independent bookstore once a month on haircut day and Donna usually buys one, while I buy an actual book. We have also bought a few at Fred Meyer when we catch them on sale.

But most of the puzzles come from thrift stores, Goodwill sells them for $1.99 or $2.99 and one place in town has all of their puzzles priced at ninety-nine cents, otherwise we probably couldn’t afford our habit.

And what a habit it is too, for the last 10 months there has always been a jigsaw puzzle going on what used to be our dining room table. I have been posting photos of every puzzle we complete on Instagram and early on I was just using the hashtags #jigsaw and #jigsawpuzzle, but after completely a bunch of them I started to add #jigsawpuzzleanonymous, a play on Alcoholics or Narcotics Anonymous, to them because it was looking like we were addicted.

As it turns out, so far, I am the only one using that hashtag, so when I want to know how many puzzles we have done so far all I have to do is look at the #jigsawpuzzleanonymous page and count the posts. There is one post with three small puzzles in it and for one panoramic puzzle of Portland, Oregon I created a triptych with 3 posts so the counts works out perfect. Right now we sit at 93 puzzles in 275 days or about one every 3 days.

Yesterday I had someone like a photo of a puzzle from a few days ago and I went to see his page, to see how he connected with me, and he posts time-lapse photos of his puzzle building. Five hundred piece puzzles in three hours…yikes, but it is fun to watch: For some reason, none of the puzzle builds are available on his YouTube anymore…

Best Nine

As sort of an Instagram tradition, everyone posts a collage of their nine highest liked posts from the previous year. Anyone who is anyone on IG seems to use the same app, Best Nine. I know this, because this year, unlike last, you had to wait for the results to be emailed to you.

When they did send it to me, it had the amount of likes each photo received superimposed in the image and I didn’t really care for that. Not because my largest like total was a paltry 117, which is good for me, but I wanted the images clean like 2019’s.

I went looking for a different, less popular, and lower rates app to use that might let me those clean images I so desired. I found one called Best 91 that let me get close to what I wanted. The grid was fine, but I needed to edit the total stats off the bottom to make the image square. As a bonus, this app let me also create my best Nine for the previous two other years as well. Below, from left to right, 2018, 2019 &2020.

Below are those statistics that were chopped off to make nice neat squares. In 2018 I made a total of 287 posts, the total likes on all those posts were 1.1k or an average of 3 per post. In 2019 total posts were 312, total likes were 2.2k making for an average of 7 per post. In 2020 total posts were 378 with total likes of 4.8k creating an average of 12 per post.