I was wondering how long it would take for anyone to mention the fact that Productstat was down. I actually took Productstat down last Saturday (a week ago now). It took 6 days before anyone actually mentioned it, which says a lot in itself unfortunately.
Doing Productstat was fun at first, but after a several of months it seemed I had absolutely no time to do anything else but work on PS and I was starting to dread it. The problem with my design for that site is all the steps involved just to do one blog post. For PS I had to:
#1 Find and schedule articles,
#2 Scan them,
#3 OCR the text,
#4 Format the text into a blog format,
#5 Proofread, which I'm terrible at,
#6 Cut out each picture, clean and format the picture,
#7 Find a spot for the picture in the article and insert it properly,
#8 Send the post up to the site,
#9 Advertise the post so I could get more than just a few readers of the post.
It was highly time consuming, so much more work and time than doing an Ephemera Library document.
Then to top it off the readership was very sparse, the smallest by far of any site I run. I asked readers multiple times that if they liked a post please on occasion share it on Facebook or other social media to help get the site more active. That hardly ever happened and I felt that it just wasn't worth the effort.
Now if I didn't have a full time job on top of everything else I would consider continuing it, but at this stage of my life I was definitely biting off more than I could chew so to speak. So I decided to take the site down and not maintain it in any way.
I may resurrect it at some point, but unless it happens after retirement, I'll need to find a way to re-design the whole thing to make it way less time consuming for the sake of my sanity.
Thanks guys for understanding!