Introducing: Bonjour, Blogger!

Well, this is awkward, dear blog.

I’ve been neglecting you. Ironically, so I can write about blogging. I’m sorry. Let’s be friends again?

For those who have no idea what I’m on about, or for those who have missed out on me talking about it (what feels like) constantly on Twitter, I’ve been busy the past few months, and super busy the past few weeks.

I wrote a book.

OK, so it’s only self published, and the version up on Amazon at the moment isn’t quite as finished as I would like, but I wrote it. I wrote 20,000+ words (over twenty flipping thousand words – probably more than I wrote in essays in my entire degree) and I’m going to be writing some more (which I’ll republish and make sure everyone who has a copy so far gets – because it’s kinda sucky when new versions of things come out the day after you bought the old one)

I’ve been working on this book since before Christmas, writing bits before work, in lunch, while on the bus – everywhere and anywhere I could, I wrote things. But then I realised that the problem with a book is that it isn’t updated as soon as something happens. While writing the book, I had to change things I’d written to account for sites closing down, sites being merged and just things not doing what they used to. I will aim to update the book when major things happen, but for certain things like explaining how to do something, a website works better. (Especially the way I like to explain things, with lots of pictures and screenshots. That just couldn’t work on Kindle)

So I made a website as well

bonjourblogger.com (and indeed the book) were created because while I love sites like IFB and iFabbo, I didn’t really feel like they were catering to their audiences very well. Both sites assume that all bloggers will want to become professional full time bloggers, but every blogger I’ve asked are just happy to bumble along and if they make some money, awesome!

I felt like there needed to be a more central sort of place that bloggers could find out tutorial style things (maybe you’re wondering about how to make a Google map of your favourite places or how to remove the WordPress admin user – which I didn’t really know until I did it recently!) or have discussions that are a bit more than just a tweet or two (like whether you’re disclosing everything you should be).

I’d really love it if you followed bonjourblogger.com – and if you have anything that needs to be answered (or you want to give some information out to other bloggers), I would love to hear from you too!