New Blog for my Writing News!

I have a brand new blog! I've titled it my "Ethereal Worlds Blog" after my anthologies.

Don't worry, I've moved everything (or most, there are some features of my on-site Word Press blog that doesn't translate over to Blogger) over to this site from my old blog, with one major exception: all comments have been deleted on older posts.



That's a shame, but the one problem I had when it transferred all the comments over was that it also copied over all the spam comments and made them as if I'd published them! Being that was over 2000 comments, with only around 50 of them valid, I elected to just delete them all rather than sort through them to delete just the spam comments.

Why did I move my blog? Aside from needing to update my blog, the main reason was that I hadn't updated my blog's guts. I think it was about 7 or 9 updates behind. And from previous experience, I'd have to get a new theme and all, because it seems the themes rarely work from one version to another. Plus, the last time I attempted to upgrade, I also had to upgrade my version of PHP the blog worked on, and that didn't go well. I had to return to the previous version of my PHP and upload my blog from a backup. So I've been putting it off for some time.

The advantage of blogger is that I don't have to worry about updates and it is free. But the blog itself stays updated and so do the themes. Plus, I have several other blogs on my blogger account, so I'm very familiar with how to use it and manipulate it. And I would then have all my blogs in one account.

"So, will older links to the blog still work?"

Pretty much. :) Actually, there were several ways to accomplish this. The route I chose was a little unconventional, but I think it works well enough. I left the Word Press blog active, but wrote PHP coding in the Word Press files to get the post title and send you to the new site using the title as a search term, which in most all cases will result in the first entry of that search to be the post you are looking for. I had to adjust it a bit, to filter out html coding that didn't translate correctly, and apparently in the transfer the curly open and close quotes were converted to straight double quotes, so I had to replace those as well. So I think I've caught most of the issues that will affect the more recent blog posts, but I didn't try all 300+ blog posts I've put up since 2006 on the blog, so I can't guarantee that you won't run into a post, assuming anyone goes looking, that shows up as not existing on this new site. But the vast majority of them should work just fine if you click on an older link.

"But what about those that are subscribed to the old blog?"

I might investigate just transferring those names over. But if you want to insure you are subscribed to this one, there is a link at the bottom of each blog post, following the comment section, that will allow you to subscribe to the blog via email or an RSS reader.

As a matter of fact, this will be a bonus! For everyone starting now until Jan 31, 2018, who subscribe to this blog, I'll send you, free of charge, an ebook of the first book in my nearly completed Virtual Chronicles series: Mind Game. All you've got to do is tell me in the comments below:

• The email address you subscribed to the blog with.
• What format you want the ebook in: mobi, epub, or pdf.

Once I've verified that you have subscribed, I'll email you a copy of the ebook as my thank you gift. If you have problems posting a comment, then send it to my email address: rlcopple@gmail.com. with the subject: "Ebook Promotion". If you have problems subscribing, contact me at the email address mentioned. Thank you!

Merry Christmas!

Hope you enjoy my new blog and format. Let me know if you have any problems!