This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American
Now you can find my classic Symbiartic posts on both Medium and The Flying Trilobite blog. So what's up with that?
I hope readers don't mind this bit of self-indulgent housecleaning in this post. This here Symbiartic blog, made up of Kalliopi, Katie, and myself, has been on Scientific American for almost 5 years (!!!) now. And we're not going anywhere - this isn't my good-bye post. From time to time I tweet about old posts that I think are still relevant - explaining where to find scientific illustrators, or ranting about image use, or revisiting the process of one of my old paintings - and I've been planning for a while to re-post them on my Flying Trilobite blog.
My personal art blog, The Flying Trilobite has been running for 9 years.
In addition to posting on The Flying Trilobite, I decided to experiment with Medium. I read a ton of posts there of course, but had never signed up for an account. I was pretty surprised that the platform can import your Facebook and Twitter followers (I only linked Twitter to mine). It's a neat idea, and obviously a big reason for Medium's success that I had never heard of before.
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Wowzers. A lot of my peeps clued into this feature before I did.
One drawback to our platform here at Scientific American is that we don't really have a good menu to find old posts. We tried to manually maintain one for Symbiartic for a couple of years, but it was a lot of work, and frankly needed more information than just post title + author to be useful. Likewise, when I switched The Flying Trilobite from Blogger to Squarespace a couple of years ago, the menu for past posts isn't dynamic, and just displays the months of each year (one of the very few quibbles I have with my Squarespace site, which I love desperately). It's hard to find the old awesomeness.
So! Solution! Cross-posting classic posts on Medium and The Flying Trilobite from the huge catalogue of posts I've written for Symbiartic, and at The Flying Trilobite.
I think it's going well: I'm happy with the traffic on both sites, and thanks to everyone who has been sharing the re-posts on Twitter and elsewhere. I don't know if it's a big deal or not, but one of the posts was even re-shared on the Medium home page for a couple of days and added the the Medium staff's Knowledge collection. That felt great.
I've said it many times before about re-sharing old artwork: there's always new people in the audience who haven't seen your back-portfolio. So why not try dusting off some old blog posts and share 'em again?