This is practically unprecedented. I've signed up for every blogging service ever released. Squarespace is a typical outing. I signed up, I created a site, I posted to it for a while...and then the testing was over and I never considered signing up for a "real" account. My head remained in "testing something so I can write about it mode" and never wandered into "using a tool that I value and enjoy" territory.

 Which is not to say that Squarespace isn't a fab service. But there's a difference between evaluating an Ariel Atom as an automotive journalist ("What style! What engineering! What performance! What FUN!") and then switching hats and evaluating it as someone whose current car has about 90,000 miles on it ("Oh, man...that open cockpit is going to _suck_ in New England weather. And am I going to have to hook up a trailer just to get three bags of groceries home?")

 But no, I'm still using Posterous and liking it. It makes blogging simple, spontaneous and fun. It also gives me a one-dropbox conduit to all of my most important services: my Wordpress blog, Twitter, and Flickr.

 So: Posterous is here to stay. Now I need to think about what its proper role ought to be. And this sort of musing only goes to show what a wonderful little service it is. The two extremes:

 1) Pull the plug on my Wordpress blog. Just transfer Ihnatko.com to my Posterous blog and be done with it.

 (No, of course I won't. I want to promote my books and other projects through my blog, and design flexibility isn't a goal of Posterous. But maybe more than anything else: using a service like Posterous represents a hell of a leap of faith. I value a lot of the writing I've done on Ihnatko.com. It's no good to keep it all on a server that I can't back up and which (according to Posterous terms of service) could disappear at any moment. But strictly on a technical basis, Posterous could serve as a "real" blog. That's quite a compliment.)

 2) Use Posterous as sort of a "SuperTwitter." I could simply see Wordpress, Posterous, and Twitter as three different tools and use the right one for the job at hand: Twitter for snappy little confections and "interactive-ish" dialogue with followers, Posterous for appetizer-sized observations (longer than 140 characters but still under a paragraph), and send "real" pieces like this one to Ihnatko.com.

 Good. I like this idea. One of my limitations as a blogger is a simple one of mindset. I don't think in terms of Dorothy Parker-esque "doo-dads." I think in terms of articles. That's what I've written regularly since I was 18 or 19. I think I've taken to Twitter because it imposes a HARD stop at 140 characters...otherwise, I get to the end of the second or third paragraph (conventional doo-dad bloggy length) and I just keep on writing.

 (Witness this post.)

 So if I train myself to send something to Posterous when I'm trying and failing to convert an idea or an observation to a molecule-sized Tweet, hell, it might save myself a lot of time and frustration.

 3) Use Posterous as a conduit and not a destination.

 Another great idea. Posterous has a fabulous hidden feature. You post to your Posterous blog by sending an email to post@posterous.com from your registered email address and if you've told the service about your Twitter, Wordpress, Facebook (etc.) accounts, it'll be copied to those other places as well. But! You can put specialized routing information there to the left of the @ sign.

 I'm writing this post in my mail client and planning to send it to Posterous. If I change the "To:" address to blog+twitter@posterous.com, this post will only appear on my Wordpress blog. Posterous will also post a Tweet containing the title of the blog post and a link to it...umm...

 ...Actually, I've never really tried it. Let's see what happens if I send an email to blog+twitter+private@posterous.com. The third is a keyword that says "don't publish this at all; put it on Posterous but keep it private."

 ...

 Hmm. No, that doesn't work. Dash it. The hitch of this is that I want Twitter followers to read the post on my blog, not on Posterous, and I want Ihnatko.com to collect all of the comments, not Posterous.

 Well, you see the sort of things I'm thinking about at the moment.

 Bottom line: I'm blogging a lot more to Ihnatko.com now that I have Posterous. I'd like to either continue those good vibes, or figure out a way to wire up Ihnatko.com to give myself the same sort of functions. But I'd like to do it in such a way that I don't wind up splitting my readership (and their responses) into three factions.

 (Developing Story)