Since our first post in January of 2013, our blog has been faithfully supported by Dan Blair of Bit Space Development (BSD). At the time, we were a brand new Website, and BSD was a brand new one-man company.

BSD has since grown into a successful interactive digital media studio. We have stayed pretty much the same. But a few weeks ago, the following nasty message popped up our blog’s dashboard:

“You cannot update because WordPress 5.5 requires PHP version 5.6.20 or higher. You are running version 5.6.4-4ubuntu6.4.”

Rough translation: even if BSD was to build an entirely new server, we’d likely still be facing a number of incompatibility issues with our old plugins and themes. So Dan, as much as he was prepared to continue supporting our site, suggested it may be time to migrate to a new host and theme.

It took about a week to move everything over from our old host to WordPress.com, including a fair bit of testing and tweaking. But it also provided a great opportunity to test the free support that came with our hosting plan. And the self-styled “happiness engineers” at WordPress came through with flying colours. Added bonus: though the look and feel have changed somewhat from our old site, our new theme offers us some great new features and benefits. For example, our members can now subscribe to the blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

So thank you Dan for all your support over the last seven years! It’s been a good run, and we wish BSD all the best in the future.

And you HG members, let us know what you think of our new virtual home.