Gary Gale

Posts about autopost

Posterous; Paused. Possibly Permanently?

Factiva.com, but that doesn't count.

If I had have run my own search engine I would have known just how important canonical URLs are and that having multiple copies of the same content hosted on different domains would cause search engines to penalise you and loose search engine ranking, fast.

I've never run or hosted my own search engine. I've run and hosted web servers, mail servers, proxy servers and caching servers (I'm even contemplating running my own URL shortener), but never a search engine. There was a time when I ran an enterprise instance of Alta Vista back when I coded for a living and was part of the team building Factiva.com, but that doesn't count.

If I had have run my own search engine I would have known just how important canonical URLs are and that having multiple copies of the same content hosted on different domains would cause search engines to penalise you and loose search engine ranking, fast.

Playing with Posterous

But I've never run my own search engine. So I didn't know any of this. I probably should have, but I didn't. Mea culpa.

So what has any of this to do with Posterous? I use Posterous. I like Posterous, a lot. I've written about Posterous, quite a bit. I also use Posterous to not only post to my Posterous blog but also to my own WordPress powered blog, on a domain I've owned for a goodly number of years, via Posterous's autopost function ... and which nicely and neatly produces an exemplar of how to have duplicate content hosted on multiple domains, with multiple URL addressing systems, for each and every post I produce.

How could I have not noticed this? Other people have, including Ian Delaney's excellent write up, punnily entitled Past Posterous.

Sadly, it looks like despite the ease of blogging that Posterous offers, there is such a thing as too easy and so for now, with regret, I've postponed my use of Posterous, possibly in permanence. Unless of course, they offer a way of specifying canonical URLs.

And with profuse apologies for the overuse of alliteration in this post.

Photo Credit: I Bought a Mac on Flickr. Written at home (51.427051, -0.333344) and posted from the Yahoo! London office (51.5141985, -0.1292006)

A Posterous Wish List

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 https://vicchi.posterous.com/.
  • Posterous autposts the entire blog post to my main, WordPress powered, blog at /.

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 https://vicchi.posterous.com/.
  • Posterous autposts the entire blog post to my main, WordPress powered, blog at /.

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

In the Spirit of Experimentation, Part 2

Posterous blog and autoposted onto my main blog.

We're all good Web 2.0 citizens these days and that means we tag everything; the Posterous FAQ has this to say on the subject of tags: "Add tags simply in the subject of your email using the syntax ((tag: apple, gadgets)). You can see your tags on the homepage of your site and click on them to see those posts."

So, in the continued spirit of experimentation, this post is tagged with "experimentation", "posterous", "autopost" and "wordpress" via the subject line "In the Spirit of Experimentation, Part 2 ((tag: experimentation, posterous, autopost, wordpress))"; let's see how this gets reflected in the post and in the autoposted WordPress version.

Posted via email from Gary's Posterous

Posterous continues to impress and is fast becoming the main source of blog posts, both on my Posterous blog and autoposted onto my main blog.

We're all good Web 2.0 citizens these days and that means we tag everything; the Posterous FAQ has this to say on the subject of tags: "Add tags simply in the subject of your email using the syntax ((tag: apple, gadgets)). You can see your tags on the homepage of your site and click on them to see those posts."

So, in the continued spirit of experimentation, this post is tagged with "experimentation", "posterous", "autopost" and "wordpress" via the subject line "In the Spirit of Experimentation, Part 2 ((tag: experimentation, posterous, autopost, wordpress))"; let's see how this gets reflected in the post and in the autoposted WordPress version.

Posted via email from Gary's Posterous