Sunday 31 December 2017

Where Have I Been?

Antigua City, Guatemala

By my estimation, it's been about ten months since I last blogged, possibly more. After moving my blog over to a self-hosted WordPress account a few months prior, I felt much more motivated to blog due to the much better functionality of the WordPress platform, and felt I could really put a lot more into blogging. I was happy to no longer blog about PR samples such as beauty products, as I was inundated with items I just didn't need, and had decided to clear most things out. I was ready to blog about things that I wanted to, as and when I wanted, without having to stick to a schedule or keep up with deadlines for sponsored posts and suchlike. However, things did not quite go to plan!

The last time I blogged, I had written a post for a stay I had been offered at the Citizen M South Bank hotel in London. I'd had a lovely stay, and was rather pleased with the post I'd written and the pictures I'd managed to capture. However, just a day after sending the link off to the PR contact, I had an e-mail back from her as well as several tweets from blogging friends who were advising me that my blog had been hacked. Sure enough, my page was littered with references to ISIS and Syria. Not exactly what I had in mind for my blog. I managed to clear out all of the muck and revert my blog back to how it was, slightly pissed off but thinking the problem was resolved. I changed my password to something ridiculously obscure and thought that was that. Two days later however, the same thing happened again. This time, they'd managed to amend all of my WordPress drafts for my recent Citizen M post (WordPress periodically saves your blog post as you write it, so at any point you can revert back to previous version), therefore the post was lost. I was really upset that I had been given an amazing stay at a lovely hotel, and the work I had done in exchange for that was completely ruined. In short, I lost motivation and left the blog alone. I realised that to do a full fix of the blog, I would need to pay someone to do a whole security fix-up, as what needed doing was far beyond my capabilities. I then left the blog until my hosting got shut down due to inactivity, and here we are.

I wasn't sure whether to try and resurrect my old Lola and Behold blog and continue on WordPress, however there were several things that made me decide to start afresh. Firstly, I didn't like the commitment of having to pay monthly hosting fees, as this made me feel that I had to blog regularly to make the most of the money, and if I ever decided to stop blogging I'd have to keep paying in order to keep my old content. Secondly, I'm about to start a very big and exciting adventure in 2018, and felt like a new blog would be a great way to document my new adventures. Granted I have lost a lot of old content that I was very proud of, and documented a lot of brilliant memories and fun times, but what can you do!

So here I am... I really missed the social side of blogging, and although I've made a lot of friends through blogging I always felt a bit of a fraud engaging in Twitter chats and suchlike without having a blog. Now I plan to get involved in the social side of the community again, and I'm super excited to get back into the swings of things, so here we go!





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