Tag: Posterous

Categories
Business Weblogging

Posterous, writing on the wall?

Sachin Agarwal : “Hi- I’ve been emailing the support link for help RE the 100MB limit for a few weeks and haven’t gotten any replies. Does anyone do support anymore? Trying to figure out if there is a way to increase my total allowed uploads for the preschool blog I started to share photos/narrative with families of children I teach. Love the interface/look/functionality but not feeling the 100mb limit! help! thanks,”

This is a comment from the announcement of the Twitter acquisition of Posterous. I couldn’t find a permanent link to the post, so you’ll have to scroll to find it.

I like Posterous, it took a while, but I warmed up to it. It’s trying to compete with the hipster juggernaut, Tumblr. That is quite the uphill battle.

I really do hope Twitter does something interesting with the Posterous platform. It would be nice to see some sort of tie in between the two. This comment leads me to believe it’s going to go the way of the dodo bird.

I still think it was a talent acquisition, but I hope for more.

Categories
Social Weblogging

Twitter Eats Posterous

Twitter LogoPosterous Blog: “Posterous Spaces will remain up and running without disruption. We’ll give users ample notice if we make any changes to the service. For users who would like to back up their content or move to another service, we’ll share clear instructions for doing so in the coming weeks.”

Twitter Blog: “Posterous Spaces will remain up and running without disruption. We’ll give users ample notice if we make any changes to the service. For users who would like to back up their content or move to another service, we’ll share clear instructions for doing so in the coming weeks.”

What to make of this? Twitter bought development talent, not a web logging platform. My guess is they’ll mothball Posterous. Look at the language in the two posts above. Words like “We’ll give you notice” and “For users who would like to back up their content or move to another service” don’t give me much faith in the continued operation of Posterous as a platform.

I could be wrong? Maybe Twitter will move their weblogs to Posterous and continue building the service as a competitor to Tumblr, maybe the service will be shuttered?

Categories
Weblogging

Dear Posterous

A wonderful boquet of flowers.I’ve been using Posterous for a while now, as an alternative stream. I post pictures to Posterous indirectly through Instagram and text through ping.fm, on occasion. I have a couple other weblogs that use Posterous exclusively, but I can’t quite move this weblog to Posterous, yet.

I have a couple requests. I believe these would get me a long way toward having the weblogging solution I’m after.

Request #1

I’d like to have the option to publish static HTML to an FTP site. A fully baked weblog. Why? A better question is, why not? I want a weblog minus a lot of dynamic content, it’s all about the content, the text, the post. I don’t need my pages rendered every time my site is hit. I’d like to generate static HTML when the “Publish” button is clicked. I was a Blogger user for years because of that feature, until it was removed. I’d love to see this feature.

Request #2

Give me different archive options. This request goes hand-in-hand with my prior request. If I move my weblog from WordPress to Posterous I need to make sure I don’t break links to my old posts. My posts are archived by YYYY/MM/DD/post, which, according to Posterous support, is not possible today. I asked support to pass that request to the development team. I hope it makes it out of the backlog.

That’s it. I believe, with these two changes, I could move my weblog to
Posterous.

Fingers crossed.

Categories
Weblogging

Tumblr over WordPress?

WP Candy: “Remember when WordPress was criticized for being “just a simple blogging platform”? Many smart and well intentioned people have worked tirelessly moving WordPress in the direction of a full fledged content management system. I was among those asking for it [more CMS features] years ago. However, was basic blogging ease and simplicity a sacrifice that had to be made?”

WordPress is a great weblogging platform. I evaluated quite a few before switching to WordPress last year. I’d been on Blogger for nine years prior.

Tumblr is very nice and I like the posting options but you have to host everything on Tumblr. Sure, you can configure it to look like your domain, but you can’t host everything. Tumblr has had some issues scaling recently, but they’re extremely successful.

At first I wasn’t a fan of Posterous but over time I’ve become a VERY BIG fan of the platform. It’s straightforward and gives you the option of publishing via email, which is quite nice. You can also use it as an aggregation point, say you want to cross publish to different outlets, it’s great at that. My brother uses it for cross publishing. It’s worked very well for him. I love the Posterous iPhone App, very clean UI, gets right to the point, and it’s easy to work with.

As for WordPress. I can’t say enough about it. It’s beautifully designed, the UX is great, it has a great developer community, and it’s very extensible. The idea that it’s too complex comes down to UX and UI more than the underlying power of it. That can be fixed if you want a trimmed down UI.

WooThemes has done a great job of creating a UI that mimics Tumblr, it’s called WooTumblog. To take advantage of it you need to do some special stuff to your theme, but that’s not a big deal for a WordPress Professional.

WooTumblr Screen shot

I can see a small business cropping up from this need. Why not offer a lightweight version of the WordPress UI that uses WooTumblog, or something like it? From the WordPress Dashboard it would be a matter of limiting what a user is allowed to see. If your job is contributing content you should only see UI related to contributing and publishing content.

MarsEdit on my Desktop

When I’m editing content I don’t usually see my WordPress Dashboard, I use MarsEdit from Red Sweater Software. It has everything I need to edit and publish to all my weblogs; WordPress and Tumblr, it’s does not yet support Posterous, but for me that’s not a big deal. It’s a great product. Fast, stable, and simple. Content contributors would probably love this UI because it’s like using a word processor.