A Posterous Wish List

Posted on 16th February 2010 by Gary

I’ve been using Posterous for a while now, a quick trawl back through the archives shows the first post I wrote via the service was in August 2009, and I’ve been using it ever since.

It’s fiendishly simple and works like this :-
  • I write a blog post in my email client and send it to post@posterous.com.
  • Posterous expands any links that it can, such as links to my Flickr account, and embeds the graphic inline in the text.
  • Posterous autoposts any embedded photos to my Flickr account.
  • Posterous looks for any tags in the subject line and autoposts to my Delicous account.
  • Posterous date and timestamps the post and puts it up on my Posterous blog at http://vicchi.posterous.com/.
  • Posterous autposts the entire blog post to my main, WordPress powered, blog at http://www.vicchi.org/.
So far, so good. My WordPress blog then uses the Twitter Tools – Bit.ly URLs plugin to announce my new blog post to my Twitter account, neatly linked into my Bit.ly account so I can track clicks and usage of the URL. It also used to publicise the new blog post to my Facebook account via the WordBook plugin but that stopped working several WordPress versions ago and posting to Facebook remains the sole manual process in my blog-flow.
So what’s there not to like? Well there’s a few niggles, most of which are autopost related.
Attach a photo to a (rich text) mail, centre it, post it and the photo is displayed in the autopost to a WordPress blog with the default alignment, which is usually left justified. Why? Because Posterous’s autopost assumes that all alignment in the original email refers to text and that works fine for text, but not for images and that was what was being aligned in the first place. Unless you know about the aligncenter class in the first class and have defined it beforehand.
Posterous provides URL shortening via the post.ly service, which doesn’t allow per account click tracking or other reporting such as that which bit.ly provides. Not that URL shortening by either is ideal and we should really be using canonical links via rev=”canonical”.
And then there’s autopost itself; it’s an all or nothing feature. So please, turn it off by default if I edit a post in Posterous I do not want to auto(re)post it, thus creating a duplicate blog post on my WordPress post and let me select on a per post basis whether I want to autopost or not.
All of the above needs to be tempered with the fact that Posterous is i) free, ii) incredibly responsive, iii) free and iv) free … it could just be so much better if these minor niggles went away.
Written and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)

Posted via email from Gary’s Posterous

Another Piece Of Bloggage By Gary

Self professed "geek with a life", geo-blogger, geo-talker and geo-tweeter, Gary works in London and Berlin as Director of the Places Registry for Nokia; he's a co-founder of WhereCamp EU, the chair of w3gconf and sits on the W3C POI Working Group and the UK Location User Group. A contributor to the Mapstraction mapping API, Gary speaks and presents at a wide range of conferences and events including Where 2.0, State of the Map, AGI GeoCommunity, Geo-Loco, Social-Loco, GeoMob, the BCS GeoSpatial SG and LocBiz. Writing as regularly as possible on location, place, maps and other facets of geography, Gary blogs at www.vicchi.org and tweets as @vicchi.

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3 Responses to A Posterous Wish List

  1. npdoty says:
    February 17, 2010 at 8:19 AM

    What I want to know is, where in this chain of tools are you inserting the location (both a human readable name and a lat/lon pair) into the end of each post?

    I’d love to see more people doing this with blog posts (and even emails); if there are existing tools to help, that would be great.

  2. Gary says:
    February 17, 2010 at 9:55 AM

    It’s nothing sophisticated. I have a bit of Javascript that uses the W3C geolocation API to get my long/lat. That then gets reverse geocoded and populates a text box which is ready selected for editing/cutting/pasting.

    I’d like to see a more elegant way of doing this but for now this suffices.

  3. Edial Dekker says:
    February 17, 2010 at 3:46 PM

    Thanks for the sum up.

    But I see one big problem. Doesn’t double posting your posts to Posterous and WordPress cause a probem with search results? Google indexes them both and ‘kills’ one of them. Try googling for content you have published and it will only show your Posterous account… I’m not sure if this is what you want, or…?