Starting to Explore plus a Blogger Frustration

I decided to start this blog as a place to record some of my outdoor activities and interesting things I find along the way.

I have two other blogs.  One is a private blog intended to keep family members up-to-date on what my kids are doing.  The other is a homeschool hiking blog (Farmington Valley Homeschool Hikers).  Granwood Explores will likely be similar to that one, but will include outdoor activities I take part in outside of the homeschool group I hike with.  I am also hoping to use GranWood Explores as a way to join in the Outdoor Hour Challenges posted at the Handbook of Nature Study blog.

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Now, to my frustration with Blogger.

I will preface this by saying I really do not understand much of anything about computers and the internet.  I know how to turn my computer on and I have managed to figure out how to accomplish most of what I want, but probably not in the most efficient way.  I do not know HTML, which is why Blogger is nice.  I don't have to know anything.  I just type.  That being said, when I run into a problem, I am in trouble.

Like my other blogs, I would like to add a photo to my header.  Unfortunately, when I try to do that, I get this message:

We're sorry, but you have exceeded your photo upload quota. For more information, check out this Blogger help page.

Okay, but the interesting thing is that I can still add photos to the body of my blog posts.  Upon further research, I see that if I have reached my quota, all the pictures I upload using Blogger (stored in Picasa Web Album - PWA) will be automatically resized to 800 pixels on the longest side.  Any files smaller than 800x800 pixels don't count toward my 1GB of free storage.  I'm cool with that.

With that information in mind, I figured I'd upload the picture I want to use for my header into the body of a post just to have PWA automatically resize it.  Once it was in PWA, I figured I could put it in my header by linking to it.  No dice.  I guess because the link is https?  (Why is the header different than the posts?)

I tried resizing it myself and grabbing it straight from my computer.  No, I get the same message about reaching my quota.  Either the picture counts toward my quota or not.  If I reduce its size, shouldn't I be able to put it in the header?

This is where my lack of understanding has hurt me.  If I had understood or, let's be honest, even known about the storage restrictions, perhaps I could have reduced picture sizes from the beginning of my foray into the blogosphere.  Questionable, but maybe.  I have looked to see if there is a way to reduce the pixels in the pictures already there, but I think it would require exporting and reloading and the likelihood of messing up all my previous blog posts seems pretty high.

On another note, I have looked at both the help page and my Picasa Web Album and there is a bit of a conflict.  If I go to the area where it shows the price for the upgraded storage plans, it shows my current plan and says I have only used 37% of my free Picasa storage.  However, if I go to the bottom of my Picasa web page, it shows that I have reached 100% capacity.  Strange.  I don't doubt that I could be at my maximum, but the inconsistency bothers me.  If I buy more storage will it really solve my problem?

The end result is, for now, this blog will have to go without a picture in the header.