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. 

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?