Welcome to my new blog

It seems a bit odd saying ‘Welcome to my Blog’ after nearly 3 years of blogging but regular readers of My Reading Corner may have noticed that it has had a makeover. I have now bought my own domain name and have migrated from Blogger to self-hosting with WordPress.

When I first started with Blogger in August 2013, I had no idea how much my blog would mean to me. It was, and still is, very much a hobby blog with no other purpose other than to tell people about books that I’ve enjoyed and that I want to recommend but it has become an important part of my life. Because of the blog, I’ve met so many lovely people, I’ve been invited to events that I could never dream of going to otherwise and of course I’ve had the opportunity to read so many wonderful books.

With hindsight I wish I had started with WordPress in the beginning but at the time Blogger looked easier and although it has served me well, I feel the time has come to invest some money into the blog and have some freedom over its appearance. As the blog became bigger, there was also the worrying niggle in the back of my mind that Blogger could at any time take my blog down if they thought I had breached their rules.

WordPress and self-hosting is all completely new to me and I am still finding my feet. After much research and googling, I decided to self-host with Kualo, a UK based company with servers in the UK/US. I had seen recommendations for them by other bloggers and they have such good reviews for server reliability and customer support, which is reassuring as I feel that a lot of hand holding might be needed!

Once I’d decided on a hosting site, I wanted to find someone who could migrate my blog for me. With nearly 300 posts and hundreds of images I didn’t feel confident enough to do this myself in case things went horribly wrong. Again, after even more googling, a UK company had been recommended by several other bloggers – Pipdig. I have to thank Phil of Pipdig for setting up WP for me, migrating my blog to one of their templates and for being very patient and helpful. He’s done a fantastic job and I’m delighted with the result – it is now definitely something that I can build on.

I hope you like my new blog as much as I do and all I want to say now is thank you very much for your continued support of My Reading Corner.

Happy reading!