Being fidgety me, I've just set about moving my blog to Posterous.
Previous to the latest Wordpress management, the blog was on Tumblr. I
like Tumblr but there was a time that I wanted to add categories and
generally more management over how to organise posts. Tumblr is also a
tad poor on the url-naming of posts, favouring a random number over
using the title of the post.
I signed up with Posterous a while ago but thought I'd give it a go.
The main appeal of Posterous is that you post to it and in turn, it
updates all your other networks - Twitter, YouTube, Facebook etc. You
can use it as a gateway to posting on your 'real' blog, or use it as
it is (which is what I'm doing).
My take on Posterous is that you mainly use your already familiar and
well-equipped email program to post from. This makes sense - a lot of
time and effort have gone into most mail applications so why double up
with exactly the same form online for just a blog?
I found Posterous a little too simple to start with - so simple that I
wasn't sure what it DID do. It doesn't seem too well explained and I
think the creators have been a bit over keen to push it's simplicity.
That said, once I had my head around what it is actually for, I've
already raced on with new blogging vigor.
Basically Posterous is a gateway. You email/text it or whatever and it
takes that format to make a nice blog post from it (makes image
attachments into little slideshows, music into online players, and so
on) it then posts this info on to whatever other accounts you have
configured - including sending any images to Flickr, videos to
YouTube.
You can post content from an online form but it's clear that they
don't really want you to do this but rather embrace the alternate and
numerous methods for posting.
It claimed to import existing blogs but on importing my Wordpress
blog, it truncated at the MORE tag and imported posts without any
paragraph formatting, leaving me looking like a really neurotic
blogger.
Also when editing a post, clicking SAVE will 98% of the time leave me
with a PAGE NOT FOUND error. Luckily clicking BACK will take you back
to the still updated edit page form when you can copy and paste you
text, go back the management page and start again.
From gmail, I also found Posterous wrapping posts in TIMES NEW ROMAN
font family styles. Not sure if that happens consistantly..
I guess the tricky thing with simplicity is making it appear worthy
enough to use without in the process 'bogging it up' so it looks
complicated. I think the could try harder to up the image a little
just to sell the beauty of simplicity a bit more.
Incidentally, this post IS via gmail so here it goes...
