Disclaimer: this may sound as a declaration of love. Because it is. I’m getting in love with you, WordPress. I want to spend more time with you, I want to stay closer. You have what I need. Yes, it’s true.

Ok, enough for the emotional part. Now I cool down a bit…

Honestly, I’d hardly find a better way to improve my English, to overcome my fears of expression in a foreign language. To jump over my fears of making errors. Since I’m discovered the exciting WordPress (dot com) community, something is going to change. First, I’m starting to write my post directly in English. This is a rather new thing for me: before, my usual procedure was simply taking a post from my Italian blog, invoking Google Traslate, and than making the needed corrections by hand.

This is changing. I want to grow, I want to learn to express myself in English, without intermediate steps.

I want to widen the spectrum of things that I can talk about. Emotions, feelings, impressions.

How WordPress can help me (and possibly, you) in that? As a matter of fact, wordpress community is a wonderful place to find interesting content in English for me to read. To learn the language, and namely, to learn the language that bloggers do use mostly.

I’m rather new to an intensive use of WordPress (dot com) facilities, since my main (Italian) blog is on Blogger (at least, at the moment writing), so in the following I list the things that most impressed me, during this path to gain familiarity with WordPress.

First, I do appreciate the Reader, with its list of updated posts from the blog that I follow. I also like the many ways WordPress team adopt for inviting you to write, as the Weekly Writing Challenge, just so say a name. Generally specking, a resource as The Daily Post is a  great point of reference if you’re looking for some intriguing idea for your blog.

The Fresly Pressed is another wonderful resource to see what it’s hot. More, there are lot of things to discover, like the 365 Writing Prompts, for example. Or Zero to zero, 30 days to make a better blog.

For what I understand, in Blogger you’re left alone, more or less. It’s a very good platform for various reason (apart from its embarrassing steady state, whereas WordPress keep updating at a good pace) , but it has not a real community that support it. Here is different, here you can feel yourself as a part of a vibrant community.

It’s for now, for this community, that I resolved to move my blog from a full installation under Altervista to a free blog inside WordPress.com, notwithstanding some technical  limitations. Yesterday I also decided to invest some euros in connecting this blog to my domain, so this is the first post under en.marcocastellani.me (admittedly, in Blogger I can do it for free, but…). I plan to spend at least some months here, to see if this is really what I like. Meanwhile, to understand a bit more about WordPress, I also bought the book The Year without pants from O’ Reilly (not too enthusiastic for the title, but ok)

All may happens, as usually. But, if I must judge from my first impressions, I think that I’ll stay.

If you’re here to improve your English, too, or if you would like to give your advice on how using WordPress for this task, I’d like to have your feelings in the comments section! Come in and drop a line!