I've never run or hosted my own search engine. I've run and hosted web servers, mail servers, proxy servers and caching servers (I'm even contemplating running my own URL shortener), but never a search engine. There was a time when I ran an enterprise instance of Alta Vista back when I coded for a living and was part of the team building Factiva.com, but that doesn't count.

If I had have run my own search engine I would have known just how important canonical URLs are and that having multiple copies of the same content hosted on different domains would cause search engines to penalise you and loose search engine ranking, fast.

I've been using Posterous for a while now, a quick trawl back through the archives shows the first post I wrote via the service was in August 2009, and I've been using it ever since. It's fiendishly simple and works like this :-

• I write a blog post in my email client and send it to post@posterous.com.
• Posterous expands any links that it can, such as links to my Flickr account, and embeds the graphic inline in the text.
• Posterous autoposts any embedded photos to my Flickr account.
• Posterous looks for any tags in the subject line and autoposts to my Delicous account.
• Posterous date and timestamps the post and puts it up on my Posterous blog at https://vicchi.posterous.com/.
• Posterous autposts the entire blog post to my main, WordPress powered, blog at /.