Moving from Blogger to WordPress
It’s been a couple of weeks since I announced that this blog would be moving from the Google-hosted Blogger/Blogspot platform to WordPress.org.
The transition has had its challenges! The transfer of over 400 blog posts took a while. Once they were in WordPress, I realized that only 10% of the comments had been transferred over. The people who are helping me with the transfer had to do a bit of back-end techy stuff and I think we now have the comments transferred.
I have now disabled comments on this site so that we won’t lose any new ones. I’ll likely have to recreate this post on the new site as well, once it’s up and running, as it wasn’t in the post-dated queue that has already been transferred.
There are still a few other hiccups which they are working on: broken links on one of the pages, Blogger labels imported as categories (when it would be better to have them as tags), etc, etc. I am having to practice a bit of patience which is not my strong suite.
But… while I’m waiting, I am getting a crash course in WordPress and it is a very steep learning curve! Kind of like going from a horse and buggy to a Ferrari! Many more shiny bells and whistles… but also many more maintenance issues for which I will now be responsible – security, backup, etc. Yikes.
Email Subscription
I’m not sure if any readers of this blog subscribe via email but… those will not work once the blog moves to WordPress. I will have a new subscription option there though. I’m hopeful that the WP contact forms and subscription options will be more spam proof than those at Blogger. I’ve been getting a LOT of spam contact form emails lately.
W.E. Hinchley-Cooke
In the meantime… I have been working on some blog posts for the future, one of which features an MI5 cartoon of Lieutenant-Colonel William Edward Hinchley-Cooke. I had received the cartoon from Nicholas Hiley last year and asked him this past week if I could post the cartoon on my blog. He saw no problem with that (the cartoon is over 100 years old) and Nick has a copy of the original booklet in which the cartoon was published. In addition, Nick sent me another cartoon of Hinchley-Cooke! Excellent…
R.W.G. Stephens
I have some promising news on the Stephens front… his second cousin (once-removed) has sent a request to MI5… and gotten a response!! Adrian B. requested any information they might have on Stephens, particularly his death. In typical bureaucratic fashion, they replied requesting his death information so that they could release information. Sigh. This was likely just a standard response and Adrian sent a response outlining all of the reasons why we believe Stephens is deceased. Not least, that he would be 120 years old if he was still alive! Fingers crossed that we get some helpful material.