With a new design comes a new initiative from the WAR blogging community. January 2009 officially marks the beginning of WAR: The Age of Blogging!
What’s all this Age of Blogging business?
What is the Age of Blogging, you ask? A gaggle of blogs in the WAR community, including some heavy-hitters (see list below), have decided to encourage new bloggers to start their own WAR blog this month.
We’re all in this together, trying to promote a game we love. Are you a budding writer, or a fount of useless WAR information or trivia? Or just a passionate player with opinions to share? We’d love for you to join us in this undertaking. Here’s what’s involved.
So, what do I need to do?
Getting a blog setup isn’t really the hard part. Tougher yet is actually writing quality content on a regular basis. That takes some effort and dedication (believe me!), but it’s always rewarding to get feedback and quality discussion amongst the community when you post something thought-provoking or just plain ol’ entertaining.
To get you started, here are a few useful links for how to start your own blog:
- Syp’s guide to setting up a Wordpress blog over at BlogWarhammer.net
- ProBlogger’s Blogging Tips for Beginners and Choosing a Blog Platform
- Blogger’s What’s a blog? tutorial & tour
- WeblogMatrix lets you compare a variety of different blogging platforms head-to-head
You can choose from a variety of different blogging platforms (most of which are free to use and very straightforward to setup), either hosted or of the install-on-your-own server variety. Here’s a quick list of some of the more popular platforms:
- Wordpress (for what it’s worth, reroller uses the self-hosted version of WP)
- Blogger
- Typepad
- Movable Type (self-hosted)
- Expression Engine (self-hosted)
- TextPattern (self-hosted, a bit more of a CMS)
Once you’ve got your blog up and running, and you’ve posted 3 to 5 items, please head over to Blog Warhammer and submit your blog in the “Introduction“ folder for everyone to see. Then you can pick up a nifty Age of Blogging banner to run on your site, too!
All of the participating sites are going to try their best to support new WRA bloggers by posting blogging tips and tutorials throughout the month of January. I’ve been blogging for a while, though I’m somewhat more low-profile than some of our other participants, so I’m more than willing to share what I’ve learned, from basic to advanced topics. Since I just finished redesigning the reroller blog, I have a lot of fresh knowledge to pass on if you’re interested. Our other participating bloggers are planning to be equally helpful, too. :)
So… who all is participating?
Well, as of this writing, we have a pretty solid bunch of WAR blogs participating in the Age of Blogging initiative. Here’s a list that I casually stole from Syp over at WAAAGH!, since he beat me to posting this earlier today (thanks Syp!)…
- reroller (that’s us!)
- WAAAGH!
- The Greenskin
- Wizards & Wenches
- Werit
- Stunty Stomper
- Way of the Chosen
- RP That Way
- Lagwar
- Tome of Knowledge
- Fires of War
- Obsessive Focus
- Blame the Healer
- Metro Gamer
- Lucky Number 2D6
- Werit
- Skurmish
So, all this sounds awesome, right? Well, what are you waiting for? Join in!
