The Journey to Substack: From Wordpress Blog to Now
Gone are the days of being five years old, plagiarising my favourite books into stories of my "own"...
I have been writing since I was a child, reading books and plagiarising them into my own little stories for myself, and this love of writing found its place for a long time on Tumblr and Quotev in the form of fan-fiction and poetry; it was only in college when I studied Creative Writing that I began to really explore the craft of writing. Sitting in a room of other writers, able to swap pieces and share feedback, workshop, and collaborate… it was inspiring. It was everything I had always wanted.
Our lecturer told us that we should, at minimum, keep a writer’s journal to carry with us so we could get used to jotting things down as ideas came and went, to express ourselves freely on the page. Beyond that, she recommended we start a blog - and so I did.
My first blog found a home on Wordpress, as many blogs do, and it is visible to this day though I will not be telling you where to find it. I stuck at it for almost the whole duration of college, and thoroughly enjoyed it, until my classes combined with a decline in my mental health got quite overwhelming. When I left college, completing my Creative Writing A-Level and thus losing my group of fellow writers, I felt a little lost, perhaps incredibly lost, but after a short hiatus I returned to blogging, still on Wordpress, but under a different blog name.
I posted somewhat consistently on my second blog from 2017 to 2020 when, for obvious reasons, life was very much up in the air. I continued writing mainly poetry, if only to keep the writing muscle in some sort of shape, and my ‘blog’ took a less traditional form over on Instagram. In those three years, I did much more with my blog than I had anticipated - writing mostly lifestyle content, I was receiving gifted products from various brands which felt insane to me as an eighteen to twenty year old, but I think it proved to me that my writing was doing something for me, and that is how I managed to keep the spark alive until the pandemic when I would ‘rebrand’ myself again.
I continued for a couple of years predominantly on Instagram (with a Bookstagram and lifestyle account), and my blog was somewhat active in the back of my mind, but somehow I could never find something that worked for me. Bookstagram became overwhelming as I fell into a years-long reading slump after my English Literature & Language A-Level, and I felt like I was growing out of my lifestyle blog. I started up a Studygram in 2020 when I went back to college, but when I left again in 2022 I was back to feeling lost. My Studygram once again became more of a general, personal blog undergoing username change after username change in an attempt to make something that felt like me and in late 2022 I found it: Cup of Kee.
Cup of Kee is the first blog that I have truly felt at home in. It is somewhat a mix of everything that has come before it; general lifestyle posts, study content (now with the Open University since completing college), and lately, lots of books. In finding myself again in blogging, I have also reignited my love of reading, something I was devastated to have fallen out of the habit of for years, and so I can finally get back to talking about books online with other book lovers! Cup of Kee has grown on Instagram, spent a short time on Wordpress, converted to my own website, and now… we’re here on Substack.
So what does Substack look like for Cup of Kee?
I feel like the internet has been drifting further and further away from traditional long-form blog posts for years now, which may be partly why I was struggling so much to find my place with a written blog, although that didn’t entirely stop me from screaming into the void on my website. As much as I was okay with that, I much preferred the engagement on Instagram, but less-so the lack of long-form writing. Enter Substack, as Hannah Montana might call it: The best of both worlds.
I am someone who stretches myself thin across online platforms, but if I’m honest, I really love doing it, so I have no reservations about adding another platform to the mix. To me, Substack combines long-form, traditional written blog posts with elements of other social media platforms; video content like you’d find on YouTube, short-form thought-posting like you’d see on Twitter, BlueSky, or Threads, photos like you’d find on Instagram, and even the ability to make Podcasts and record voice-overs for written posts? Incredible! And to send all of your content to your subscribers in a handy little newsletter? Perfect for someone who was always forgetting to utilise the mailing list feature on my website (not to mention struggling to get sign-ups).
Substack is giving me the opportunity to reconnect with traditional blogging, and to find a new community along the way! I have also really missed reading traditional written blogs, but on Substack, the posts are endless.
I am still learning the ropes here but I am feeling so welcomed and at home already, I really can’t wait to see what Substack can do for my blog. The opportunities truly feel like a wide open door.
I hope you’ll follow me here on Substack to join me on this journey! I’d also love to know your personal journey to Substack and your relationship to traditional blogging, so please feel free to share your story in the comments!
I am of course still posting across all the other wonderful online platforms, so if you do want to follow me on any of those you can do so by clicking here, but if you’d like to stay here on Substack then please do subscribe.
Stay Cosy!
Kee
It took me a little while to come around to Substack. We’re mutuals on enough platforms that you’ve probably seen my rants about owning your own content on a website.
But I like Substack for the same reasons you’ve listed. There’s a little bit of everything. But the focus is more on long-form text, which is my preference. Used to beat myself up because I don’t read many novels, then realised that I’m just a non-fiction gal, and I like the format of the long article. Like Wikipedia, with a bit of pizazz!
Once I started reading, I couldn’t help but want to join in— I started blogging in 2000 at the age of 11, it runs deep. I decided to lighten up a little bit and just enjoy something for the sake of enjoying it!
It’s making the time I spend online more meaningful and I’m feeling more inspired. It might become evil like all of the other platforms, but I guess we can enjoy it now!
I’m still working on a website, but I can also have fun over here. It really is a Hannah Montana situation.
Are we the same person? 😅 jk, but I swear I have a similar timeline and a ghosted WordPress blog to show for it too. I wrote about my why for moving to substack last week, and I feel like everyone feels the same! Long form social media, without feeling like screaming into the void of your lone website/WordPress ☺️