Write.as Blog

Write.as has teamed up with Coil to give their Coil Blogs authors a comfortable, permanent home for their writing, as they sunset their content platform and move toward their exciting next phase. We’re excited to welcome everyone to our community!

Last summer, we met with the good people at Coil to discuss the Web Monetization technology they’re building. In addition to being interested in their tech and recognizing our shared ideals, we saw that Web Monetization would be a perfect fit for our platform — and agreed Write.as would be a great new home for Coil Blogs creators.

So together we started working on a way for these creators to seamlessly migrate to Write.as — posts, photos, and all. We developed some features that this new community would need, from rich media embeds to (of course) Web Monetization support (now available on Write.as, WriteFreely, and Snap.as profiles). Then we worked closely with the Coil team to improve our API and support all the data they needed to migrate.

Now, as a Coil Blogs user, you’ll see a prompt to migrate to Write.as. With just a few clicks, you’ll be able to move all of your content to a brand new or existing account here. To help walk you through this, Coil wrote up an excellent guide.

Getting Started

If you’re coming from Coil Blogs, you’ll notice some key differences that may take a minute to get used to here. First, you can write your posts in plain text and add formatting with Markdown — our Getting Started guide is the best place to learn how to do that. Otherwise, you can switch to our Classic editor for more of a “rich text” experience. Just one thing to note: it’s still in beta, and lacks support for things like exclusive content right now. (But that’s coming soon.)

To add photos, you’ll either use our Classic editor or Snap.as (included with your free year of Pro). If you’re on a computer, you can install the Chrome or Firefox extension to make this even easier.

You’ll also find our community over on Read Write.as. Since we’re built around privacy, authors have to opt-in to join this space — so you might not see everyone you’re used to on there. If you’d like to join yourself, first check our guidelines and then switch your blog to Public.

Finally, we’re running a limited-time sale on our iPhone app, to help Coil Blogs users get up and running. You can get 66% off the app until June 2 — read more about this on our Deals blog.

What’s Next

As everyone settles in, we’ll be keeping our ears open for feedback from our newest community members. We want to be sure everyone continues feeling comfortable publishing here throughout this transition and beyond. So if you’re new to Write.as, please don’t be a stranger — reach out anytime on our forum, via Twitter, email, or the fediverse (@write_as@writing.exchange).

For our existing community, we hope you’ll welcome our new writers, who share plenty of our interests and a pleasant diversity of viewpoints. You might also consider joining them in adding Web Monetization to your blog, or grabbing a Coil subscription to support each other, both here and across the wider web.

If you have any thoughts, questions, or feedback, we’d love to hear it on the forum!