Hello there Posterous
In my last post, I had tried to post some code but could not get it to work. I thought I would use Gist to show it. Even though I’m more of a Bitbucket type of guy than a Git guy, all the cool kids are using Gist. The problem was, Tumblr didn’t like me trying to embedd a gist block in my blog. They strip out all script tags from the body of the post. I even had my Javascript guru try to hack something into Tumblr for me, with no success. In the end, I took screenshots of the code, uploaded them to Tumblr as private image posts, and then linked to them. It was a painful process. To make matters worse, once one of my coworkers read the post and suggested a couple changes, there was no easy way to update the screenshots, so I just left them as is.
I started looking around the next day and stumbled across Posterous.com I signed up and explored the site. It looked like it could be a Tumblr competitor, so I dug some more. One thing I wanted to know was how easy will it be to post code. To paraphrase The Most Interesting Man in the World “I don’t always post code, but when I do, I prefer it to be easy.” I found two things. One, if I want to post code in the blog, I can use markdown syntax to accomplish that. Two, if I want to use Gist, all I have to do is paste the gist link. These two things greatly simplified my life as a developer-blogger. I was sold.
The next hurdle I had was that Tumblr allowed me to use my domain (taylonr.com) and have it be hosted on their servers. This was another thing I definitely wanted. I’ve had wordpress blogs, and I’ve hosted my own wordpress blogs before and I always felt like I spent more time managing the blog (updating etc) than I did writing the blog. I wanted to let someone else host it, and just have to worry about the content. After a quick search, I found out that Posterous would also allow me to change my A record and host my blog on their servers with my domain.
The last hurdle I had before I started blogging was how do I get all my old content over to the new site? I didn’t want some stuff going to taylonr.tumblr.com and others going to taylonr.com. I really wanted to bring over all the history. Finding out that Posterous will handle my importing made me very happy. Then when I went and actually imported the content and it only took me 3 clicks, it made me even happier. Then I checked on a post and saw that the image in the post was no longer hosted on Tumblr, but on Posterous, I was ecstatic.
I know I’m still in the honeymoon phase, but as of right now, Posterous meets or exceed all my blogging needs.