Virology Down Under has lived over on Google’s Blogger platform since its first post back in March 2013.

After much umm’ing and ahh’ing, I’ve taken the plunge and moved VDU to this platform, along with its own domain name – virologydownunder.com.

This will hopefully allow more control of the look of the site and provides much more helpful text editing and formatting tools and templates. The move comes at some actual financial cost – Blogger was free, this is not – but since all of this writing has been done using my/my family’s personal time, it isn’t too surprising that I’d also have to invest some personal dollars at some point. I’ve paid for 5-years up front so we’ll see how it goes!

Currently I’m in a bit of a blogging drought though since I’m trying – without a lot of success – to write up old data for the scientific publication treadmill. It’s proving harder than I’d imagined, which actually isn’t too surprising to me..knowing me…but some papers are coming together interspersed as they are with reviews and new papers from my current job.

 

But I do enjoy blogging so I hope to get this going again. I also hope to bring across the blogger posts. It remains to be seen how easy – or not – that process will be.

As ever, my partner in life helps me out – and as ever I’m grateful to the universe for her and our kids. It was after all, escaping from the latter via a suggestion from the former that put me on the path to writing and social media in the first place.

Lastly, this definitely won’t be the final form of the new design – so expect colours and styles to shift around for a while. Feel free to drop me thoughts about what you see.

-Ian