Friday Find: "How to Create a Simple Writer Blog"

For those of you who have not yet created a blog, today’s your lucky day! Peta Jinnath Andersen provides some truly excellent tips on getting one started. I wish I’d seen a post like this before I started mine!

Which raises a question I’ve considered asking here before: Have any of you transferred a blog from Blogger to WordPress, and if so, what advice do you have?

Thanks, and enjoy the weekend. See you back here on Monday. (Can’t believe it will be March!)

9 thoughts on “Friday Find: "How to Create a Simple Writer Blog"

  1. deonne kahler says:

    I haven't migrated from Blogger to WordPress, but I probably should. I hope other readers will share how they did it!

  2. Pat says:

    Hi Guys,

    Setting up a Wrodpress Blog is very simple on a hosting company like hostmonster. com.

    Migrating your existing data should be pretty simple too as WordPress has import functions:
    http://codex.wordpress.org/Importing_Content

    Pat

  3. Chloe Yelena Miller says:

    That was a great link! I moved from WordPress to Blogspot, but mostly because I wanted to reinvent myself and have a more narrow focus. I didn't try to copy over the old posts. Blogspot is easy to use and there are a lot of handy add-ons (like Google Analytics.)

  4. Peta Jinnath Andersen says:

    Hi Erika,

    Thanks for the link love back to my GLA post!

    I've actually been fooling around with moving my husband's old blogger site over to wordpress.

    The most important thing you can do is backup your blogger site. Here's a list of useful tools.

    After that, there are a couple of ways you can transfer your blog. Under the tools menu in the LHS menu, there's an import function. The instructions are all there and easy to follow.

    If you're self-hosting, there are a bunch of plugins to help you do the job–just go to "add new" under "plugins", type blogger, and they'll show up. I haven't personally used "blogger to wordpress", but I've heard good things about it.

    Depending on your theme and the way your posts are set up, you may get a bit of a code mess in WP. Don't panic–you can always go bak to blogger, select "html view", and copy that directly into the "html view" in WP. There are other plugins that may help clean things up as well.

    Hope this helps! Good luck with the move!

  5. Carol J. Alexander says:

    I'm also interested in converting from blogger to wordpress or, at least, using a 3 column blogger template. But I have a question about content that has been in the back of my mind for a while.
    Do writer blogs have to be about writing? If the purpose of the blog is to build my platform on a particular area of expertise, shouldn't my blog be about that area of expertise? Any comments on this would be helpful.

  6. H Myers says:

    My writing blog contains observations about writing life (such as I know it), quotes and references from books on the subject that I enjoy, and the occasional language-related silly bit.

    I moved from VOX to Blogger. One reason I chose Blogger over WordPress is because Blogger doesn't charge for access to page CSS like WordPress does. I'm nowhere near prepared to pay for anything on a blog site, and I don't want to have to deal with hosting right now. On Blogspot it's easy to set up your new blog. Importing is a problem, but that's one of the few downsides I've found.

  7. Erika D. says:

    Thanks for all the comments, and a special thanks to Peta for dropping by! Carol, I don't think your blog *has* to be about writing. If you're a nonfiction writer writing about a non-writing topic, for instance, that topic might be a better focus to build your "brand." Some writers (see Chloe' Yelena Miller, above, for one example) maintain multiple blogs for their multiple interests.

  8. Sara Lucinda Bell says:

    Thanks so much for posting this! I had just created a writing blog for myself and then I found your blog and started following you. These tips are so helpful! I'm looking forward to seeing what else you have to suggest! =]

  9. Jenn says:

    I've just started using WordPress (the open source app, not the free hosting service), and while the learning curve is a tad steep for a CSS/PHP newbie like me, I absolutely love what you can do with it for creating static site/blog hybrids. My long-overdue author site feels like it's within reach now (and I can't recommend the Thesis theme highly enough).

    I'm about to transfer a blog from Blogger to WordPress too, so I'll let you know how it goes.

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