Bruce's Blog

I’m ditching self-hosted Wordpress and I’m going to give Posterous a try. Considering my last blog post was back in December it’s rather obvious the whole Wordpress blog thing wasn’t working for me anymore. I’ve find myself drawn to Twitter more than traditional blogging. If I want to say something with Twitter I just say it. I don’t have to get a form of anxiety over if my thoughts are structured enough to be worthy of a blog post. Why get anxiety over something so stupid? It’s not logical but there is no sense in ignoring it.

Posterous and its main competitor Tumblr seem to promote a more free-form means of communication. They feel like a hybrid between the traditional blog as implemented by WordPress and the often too-short microblogging format presented by Twitter.

Posterous in particular is interesting because of the main method you use to add content to your site. To add a post just send an email to post@posterous.com. That’s it. Posterous then goes through the email and converts it into a post. If images are attached it creates a gallery with thumbnails and puts it in the post. If video is attached it transcodes it and puts a flash player widget in your post. No formatting or HTML if you don’t want to. If you want more control over formatting Posterous supports the Markdown text format.

Of course you can use the website to add and manage content. There is a WYSIWYG editor with the typical brain damage, a raw HTML mode and some meta data editing provided for all posts. The management website is clean and gets the job done. The multimedia uploader widget worked quite well. I was able to upload a couple dozen images at the same time and it added them to the post, put them together as a group with thumb-nailing and Javascript slideshow love. Slick.

There is no iPhone app or Android app. You are encouraged to use your email client or SMS to generate content. Take photo, tell the photo app to send email. The philosophy is that you shouldn’t need to use or learn a special program or way of doing things. Just dump your thoughts into text and attach your multimedia without having to worry about presentation details. Wordpress involved uploading media to your media library and pulling it into the post and gallery support was incomplete and required plugins to not suck. The Android app didn’t make this any less annoying sadly.

I imported my self-hosted Wordpress into Posterous using Posterous’s migration tool. All of the posts imported over along with all their comments and some of the images. While the “migration” only took a few minutes for several years worth of blogging it unfortunately required some manual cleanup. The three sources of problems requiring manual intervention:

• In Wordpress’s export file a couple dozen of my posts were marked as being posted on January 1, 1970 even though the correct date is shown within Wordpress. Thankfully Posterous let me manually edit the post dates on these entries.

• Many years of fighting with Wordpress’s changing content munging and WYSIWYG editors meant quite a few posts ended up in the Wordpress export XML file without appropriate HTML formatting. Sigh. Posterous seems to generate sane HTML formatting at least so I viewed it as a long term investment.

• Some images didn’t import correctly. It seemed the newer the post the more problematic the image import. The older images that imported correctly were included in the original Wordpress post with manually written HTML. The newer posts tended to be WYSIWYG edited. Not sure who to blame on this one.

(Sorry for the RSS churn caused by the move!)