Saturday, June 11, 2011

If I Move To Wordpress Will You Still Follow?

This first full week of summer vacation has been spent in professional development.  Yesterday's class was all about blogging.  I've been blogging for a couple of years, but wanted tips on how to do it better, as well as getting tips on how to use blogging with my students. Got some great ideas, but found out that I will not be able to use blogger with my students.  Something about not being able to restrict searches on blogger and therefore not being able to keep the appropriate level of safety/privacy for students.

I totally understand the reasoning.  I've already moved my school library related blog over to the D20 Wordpress site. You can find it at Mrs. Archer's Book Notes.  I have strict privacy settings on it - i.e. all comments have to be approved by me before they are posted.  This blog is not school related, but covers books of all genres and ages.  However it does have information that I like to share with my staff.  If I keep it on blogger, they won't be able to access it from school.  Educators are busy.  If I send them a link to a blog post they might find useful, then tell them they can't look at it until they get home, chances are they'll have forgotten about it by the time the get home.

After the recent Splash Into Summer Blogger Hop Giveaway, my followers jumped up to 149. I was very excited about this.  Though I'm sure many of those new followers only signed up for a chance to win the Amazon gift certificate I was giving away. Still, I worry that if (when) I move to Wordpress, I'll lose those followers.

Another advantage to moving this blog over, would be having everything on the same dashboard. Of course that would mean I'd also have to move my Breast Cancer and Photography Blog as well.

I think I know what I'm going to do, but tell me - What would you do?

3 comments:

Joyce said...

Sounds like a good decision to change. A blog's being on Wordpress or blogger or any other place wouldn't cause me to follow or not to follow. The important thing is the content.

Alyce said...

You can actually transfer your Google Friend Connect followers widget to another blog without losing any followers. You can google for the instructions, but I found a site with what I thought were easy instructions here: http://www.blog.taterbean.com/clicky-things/tutorials/how-to-keep-your-google-friend-connect-followers-when-moving-from-blogger-to-wordpress/

Hope that helps!

Booklady said...

Alyce that's sounds great, but since I'm using Wordpress.com and not Wordpress.org, it won't let me use a plugin, but I'm going to google some and see what I come up with.