Hello.

Welcome to my blog.

Move along now.

A wee while ago Twitter bought Posterous. There was uncertainty at the time about what this would mean – for the service, for the existing blogs hosted by Posterous, for the people behind its development and whether that was the cue to jump ship. I stuck around, partly through inertia and partly because I figured that the import/export tools to make a clean transfer to an alternative would only get better as time went by.The situation took on a new urgency a week ago when it was announced that Posterous was about to disappear. So the last week has been an interesting mix of experimentation, discussion, play and progress. Having started the old blog with my own domain name I've transferred that across too and am now happy enough to start posting in the new blog and driving a little traffic that way.My new blog is a self-hosted WordPress.org affair and my key to getting it there was to go via WordPress.com (which is the WordPress-hosted version). At first I wanted to go direct from Posterous to .org, but there wasn't a native import tool available. Third party tools were there to try, but they didn't cut it. WordPress.com does have its own importer though, so I created a free space there, imported from Posterous, then went from there to my desired self-hosted site. Some bits of formatting have gone awry and it doesn't seem to handle photos as well as Posterous (in galleries), but the posts are there and available for editing. What's very satisfying is that the metadata has come too, primarily the tags and some other stats – this includes the posts keeping their original date of posting. Remarkably the links I've sent out since starting the blog appear to still work, redirecting to the new site.I'm now open to ideas on how best to progress from here, what to add to the space and what to take away. The possibilities are clearly much broader than they ever were with Posterous, so I've come of age... or at least I'm found a place at the grown ups table even if I don't recognise half the food on my plate.

Physician, heal thyself

Edinburgh's Hogmanay: 'Big Bang' on 1 January 2013 #blogmanay