Skip to main content

Here’s What You Can Do with That Old Blog After Launching a New Website

If you write online for years on end there will come a point where you will end up with multiple old blogs and abandoned writing projects residing on various platforms across the web.

Just to give a personal example, I have a blog on Tumblr that I played with in late 2015 and early 2016, and I also have a humor blog filled with dad jokes that I still use from time to time. I plan to take Mike Cane’s approach of letting the old blog(s) lie fallow after I put down the keyboard and walked away, but  did you know we have another option?

One question I have been getting more and more from authors is how to move their old blog to their new site without mixing the old and new posts. Sometimes the author had switched genres or audiences, or perhaps they had decided they wanted to adopt a different blogging style but didn’t want to throw away all they had written before.

It used to be that you had to set up separate sites so you could keep the old and new content separate (see Rocket Bomber and its archive for an example), but lately what I have been doing is using the "Custom Post Type" feature of WordPress to set up a second (or third, or fourth) blog on a WordPress site just to act as an archive for an old blog.

I’ve used this trick three times in the past year to give a client’s site a second blog. In one case it was an archive for old blog posts, and in the other two cases my clients just wanted two separate blogs on one site. (BTW, I will soon be using this trick on The Digital Reader so I can continue to write posts like this one and yet keep them out of the main blog. TDR is a news blog, and the post you’re reading right now – while very interesting – doesn’t quite fit.)

The cool thing about this second blog idea is that you still get to use things like categories, tags, and featured images on the extra blog(s) – it even has its own RSS feed which readers can follow. But best of all, a second blog is relatively easy to set up. (Now, if you want to move posts from a whole other site, for example a Blogger or Tumblr blog, it is going to be a little more difficult to put them on the second blog on a WordPress site. But it can be done.)

To set up the second blog, I use a plugin called Custom Post Type UI to create the second blog (CPT UI does a lot more than just make a second blog, but that is the topic of another post). All I have to do is fill in certain key technical details, and click the blue button, and most of the work is taken care of for me.

Now, this plugin doesn’t work with all WP themes, but generally I have found that it is a quick and easy way to create a second blog.

How would you like to use two blogs on your site?

Similar Articles


Comments


Mike Cane December 5, 2018 um 11:07 am

Huh. Interesting idea. And my past blogs are probably going to start being exterminated next year when I have the time. It’s something Ive thought about a lot. Google searches no longer lead to any of the oldest.


Write a Comment