“Life is an Exciting Adventure!” is one of my favorite sayings and the past several months have certainly borne that out! I can hardly believe it has been 9 months since my last Wild Thing post! So, what happened? Well, a series of unfortunate events led me to take a break from blogging…

Last April, my blog became infected with a worm, a bug, or some such creature that wiggled it’s way into my WordPress.org hosted platform and refused to leave. I shut the blog down to protect you from any harm this malicious creature had in mind and set about eradicating it. I had controls in place on the blog to help prevent such an attack, but since WordPress.org is an open platform, it’s more vulnerable to attack than other more closed platforms and this was a particularly nasty bug.

I hired a group to clean out the bugger but he was very elusive, nimble, and able to replicate. Every time they would find him, he would clone, go underground, and find a new place to hide, then pop up again a few days later. Several hundred dollars and several months later I finally surrendered and decided I couldn’t beat him without spending a lot more money and time, so I looked for a less expensive, less time consuming solution to the problem.

Ultimately, I decided the best option would be to move my content from WordPress.org to a new platform. I researched blog platforms that offered robust protection from attack and a snazzy look and settled on Square Space. I like the clean lines and easy to use tools as well as their robust security. WordPress.org offers enormous opportunity for customizing a blog, but with that opportunity comes risk and a lot more programming time than I was willing to continue investing. A more controlled blog environment like Square Space offers less in the way of custom options, but provides much greater security and is easier and less time consuming to use.Let’s just get on with the fun of posting already! The Square Space platform offers all I need now as well as all I can foresee wanting in the future and will free me from worry about nasty attacks.

Copying the content of my WildThingEscapes blog to the new platform seemed easy at first, as many things often do. All the content transferred cleanly but I soon discovered that any photos contained within a gallery structure on the Worldpress.org platform did not migrate to my new Square Space home. Well, as you know, my blog is full of photos and most of them were in galleries,…yikes!

It took me many weeks of moving photos manually out of galleries on my WP blog before trying the transfer again. There were times I wondered if it was all worth it, but being one who is usually up for a challenge I persevered and in the end was able to save all the posts from my first year of adventure in Wild Thing to a new home, safe from marauding critters. Whew!

I’m still working on the format of this new home but it’s good to be back and I wanted to get reconnected as soon as possible. I’m looking forward to continuing this journey with you as I enjoy life on the road with Dexter in my beautiful 5th Wheel Trailer called Wild Thing! I think 2019 is going to be an exciting year so stay tuned! Please leave me a comment below to let me know how you like the new look!