So, What’s New?

Friday evening, I had this strange urge to backup all my blogs.  I mean, the thought entered my head, “When was the last time you backed up your blogs?”  So, I idly thought, well, I’ll do it Sunday when it’s more convenient.  Then, I had this strange thought, “No, back them up NOW!”  Startled by the intense feeling, I did just that.

Yesterday morning, I woke up and checked my iPhone, which was going crazy with all sorts of errors.  It complained it couldn’t login to Gmail.  So, I went to the computer, and I was greeted with a “suspicious activity” warning and told to verify my account.  Well, I did that, and then went to check Blogger, and I only had two blogs showing, and one of those was disabled!  One blog was completely gone.  I mean, it wasn’t even showing.  The other had a restore link, so I clicked on it to see if I could restore it.  I then wandered over to the help center and saw a few other people were having issues finding their blogs, so I posted a note and hoped for the best.

At very least, as far as I could tell, my account wasn’t hacked, which was my initial thought.  So, I tried to put it out of my mind the rest of the day, but that wasn’t easy.  I had to keep sweeping it away.  I’ll admit it was difficult to do so.  Blogging takes a lot of time and effort, and this one in particular is a labor of love.

Later in the evening, I started a more intense look into what was going on, and Google had posted that they were looking into the rash of reported “blog removals”.  Some were completely missing, and some were marked as “removed” (allowing a review before permanent removal).  It soon became evident it was a more widespread issue than I thought even that morning.

I have considered for some time moving the Church of God Perspective blog to a more permanent home.  In fact, I already had a thrown together website for the www subdomain that I had been working on earlier.  I’ve also been dissatisfied with the commenting system in comparison to WordPress.  Fortunately, I already registered a domain name, so all I need to do was move around where it pointed to.  I have been reluctant to do so, however, as that means a lot of churn for the readers (in particular those using RSS feeds).  However, now the churn has occurred in spite of staying put.

So, I went to work last night getting web space and installing WordPress onto it.  I played with the address trying to get it to propagate out a little faster, but that wasn’t going to happen last night.  Everything else was basically set except for knowing how to import the blog from Blogger, but without the address working, it wasn’t going to happen last night anyhow.

So, this morning, the URL (web address) was working again.  I then setup the theme and got busy importing past articles.

And so, here we are.

For now, reading articles is public and commenting is done by registered users, but it’s easy to register.  You can login or register by clicking the “logged in” link under Leave a Reply:

You’ll come to the login screen, and to register, click on the Register link underneath:

You then choose a username and put in your email, and a password will be emailed to you.  After logging in, you’ll be able to make comments.  If it doesn’t appear immediately, it is probably waiting for moderation.

Obviously, some things aren’t quite settled yet, and this was done in a hurry.  However, one big change you may or may not notice is that this is now part of a (soon to be) larger website.  I hope to upload some materials written about or by HWA and provide links and material related to COG history (one of my smaller hobbies).  One thing I hope to accomplish is be able to organize the larger articles so topics of interest can be read by those with questions about a particular subject.  WordPress has a facility for “pages”, but they could also go on the main website where they might be more visible.

In other words, there are general plans, but they are far from concrete yet.  So, if you have a suggestion, feel free to give it.