Welcome

Welcome to Petrona! This weblog has moved from its previous home on Blogger , to this beautiful new home on Typepad. The old Petrona will stay live (I hope!) so that existing links to postings will still work, but I will no longer be making new postings there. If anybody is reading this and has bookmarked the old Petrona, I would be grateful if you could replace that bookmark with the new url, which is: http://www.petrona.typepad.com

Some notes about this new site.

• I have copied the entire Petrona archive back to the first-ever posting in December 2005 into this new site.
• All posts now have subject categories. There is a list of categories in the right-hand sidebar so that all posts in a particular category can be viewed at one click. However, it was very time-consuming applying categories retrospectively to all the old posts, so some of the older posts aren't as precisely categorised as they might be. New posts (from today) will be categorised more accurately.
• The process of copying this weblog from Blogger to Typepad was, incredibly, carried out by yours truly with the sole aid of the Typepad instructions and one helpdesk email (which was answered the next morning, wonderfully, but by then I'd worked out how to do it ;-) ). However, the process did not copy over any comments. I have therefore manually pasted in all comments to the body of the post, as a sort of "better than nothing" solution. I have disabled the link on the name of the commenter as the link was broken in the process. Apologies for that, but about 95 per cent of the commenters are in my 'recommended site' list in the left-hand sidebar. (Frank Wilson is Books, Inq.; Jenny D. is Light Reading; Amy is Books, Words, and Writing; Mapletree7 is Book of the Day; Bibliophile is Another 52 Books; Dr Ian Hocking is This Writing Life; Giles-GB (latterly James) is New Tammany College; most other commenters have the same name or nearly the same name as their weblogs.)
• Old links. In all the postings previous to this one, any links that refer to other postings on Petrona are (as of today) to the old Petrona not this one. It is a slow process to manually go through every post and change the links, so if anyone is reading an old post and finds an incorrect link, or a link that goes to old Petrona, please can they write a comment so I can change it?  Many thanks!
• I've created one or two lists of sites in the left-hand sidebar, and put a bit about me and this weblog in the "about" page to the left. On the right-hand side (scroll down) are some Typepad "widgets" which are a bit beyond me, but they seem to be to do with rss feeds and search, so I've put them in -- I will learn!
• If anyone is interested in my feedback about the process of changing from Blogger to Typepad, please leave a comment and I'll contact you by email. In the end, it was relatively easy (I am not very technoliterate so it would be easier for many people than it was for me), but time-consuming. I have been very impressed by the Typepad support desk; I asked them two questions during the whole process, and they answered both perfectly. But there are very good auto-help pages that answered virtually all of my (many) questions before I had to use the email help function. Omens are good.

Finally, a couple of things. First, apologies for the lack of posting over the past few days/evenings, but I have wanted to get this weblog up and running. Normal service will be resumed from tonight I hope, although at the moment in the UK it is exam time of year -- Cathy has school exams and Jenny SATs, so I am also in demand for revision guidance.

Second, apologies for asking you to change Petrona's address. I know it is a pain to change addresses, but please do it if you can bear to, as I love it when people read Petrona, especially when they leave their comments. If you want to leave a general comment as to the kinds of postings you like the best, please do so here. Broadly speaking, I tend to post book (and occasionally film) reviews, or summaries of interesting websites/weblog postings (particularly if I find several on a theme) or media articles. The kinds of sites I follow are on the interface between books, the media, publishing, the web and "that sort of topic". My summaries are sometimes summaries and sometimes my rather idosyncratic take on the content!

Thank you very much for reading this post, and, once again, welcome to New Petrona!