I've been mulling over a change for a while now - with regards to my use of Twitter. I've had my account for a while now, and when I set it up I used the school name (@porchester) as I was (and still am) tweeting mainly about educational matters; sending requests, passing on tips, giving advice, seeking help, etc.
I also set up an account for the school (@porchester_jun) to automatically send a tweet whenever a new article appears on the school website, and it's this second account that has made me reconsider.
Do I really want a personal account with a name so similar to the school account? No, it has too many potential problems that could occur. I know I've protected my tweets (call me paranoid, but I think it's a good plan for a teacher to do this and keep their tweets out of the public timeline), and I make sure I say nothing that could be used against me by pupils / parents / staff / local authority, but it really isn't worth the risk and so I have decided that my name has to change.
And today I took the plunge. I asked a few other people on twitter how they went about making the change, and was advised to make sure no one was trying to follow me at the time of the transfer and did it. A simple change of word in the settings on my account and @porchester became @xannov.
I've kept the same image on the account (a good tip from @primarypete_ for people who haven't noticed the name change at first), and will do so for a while - infact it might stay the same, I like that image!
The downside of the change was that all my @porchester lists are now @xannov lists - anyone who has linked to them will now receive an error page unfortunately, and I had to update a lot of credits on the 2DIY archive to the new name.
Linked services to twitter may be a problem over the next few days / week as they re-cache their data (twitterfeed / MrTweet / embeditin / twibbon / twitpic / etc), but I'll deal with those as they arise.
One thing I did do, once I'd changed from @porchester, was create a new account with that name and placed a single tweet on it - for anyone who might miss a message regarding the change;
So, now that the account has been changed on the web, it's time to update all the apps / services on my iPhone as well now.
Oh, and why Xannov? Well, I've been online since '94 - that's 15 years, and "X + V" makes 15, and "anno" means year(s). Butchering Latin there, but I like it. :o)
