Gary Gale

Posts tagged as "posterous"

Posterous; Paused. Possibly Permanently?

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.

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A Posterous Wish List

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 /.
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2009 In Review Part 1: Gadgets

As the end of 2009 and of the decade of the noughties approaches rapidly, I thought it worthwhile to look back over the previous 12 months and give credit where credit is due or overdue. So let's start with gadgets.Not one but three. 

Firstly there's Posterous. Can a web service be a gadget? I think so. According to Wikipedia, gadgets "are invariably considered to be more unusually or cleverly designed than normal technological objects at the time of their invention".So, Posterous. Yes it's a blog creation tool but it's a simple, fiendishly simple blog creation tool. Nothing more than an email to post@posterous.com and you're done. It's how I wrote and posted this post. You focus more on the act of what you're writing, or the photo you've just taken, than on the mechanism where the post is formatted and uploaded. My posterous blog is https://vicchi.posterous.com/ and this auto feeds into my main WordPress driven blog at /.

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Deliciousness: themes gained, avatars lost, accents found, London and the end of the world, scrobbling and Streetview

Look at all of this stuff that fell down the back of the internet and got lodged in my Delicious bookmarks ...

Posted via email from Gary's Posterous

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You Don't Always Get What You Pay For, But Sometimes You Get It For Free

Here in the UK we're used to bad or non-existent customer service, so much so that it's virtually ingrained into our genes. We're well aware of the oft used expression that you get what you pay for except that you actually don't; you continue to pay and act pleasantly surprised when you actually get what you've paid for, murmuring "well that's a turn up for the books". We look longingly across the Atlantic to the US and talk admiringly of the "American service culture" whilst conveniently overlooking the fact that our US counterparts get paid rock bottom wages and have to work damn hard to garner enough tips to make a living.

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In the Spirit of Experimentation, Part 2

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

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In the Spirit of Experimentation

Posterous is a service that just begs for experimentation; not only because it's a beautifully simplistic yet rich service but also because the Help and FAQ pages can be a little bit light on detail for some of the less obvious questions; probably to avoid scaring those of a less-power-user-frame-of-mind away.

So the Posterous FAQ at https://posterous.com/faq says this "We'll do smarter things for photos, MP3's, documents and video (both links AND files)".

Link eh? In the spirit of experimentation let's try this, firstly from the easy and obvious one ... twitpic.com

... and rival yfrog.com ...

... and from my Flickr photostream ...

... and finally a more challenging one, from my Facebook photo album ...

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=3454882&id=757562989

... there's only one way to find out, so let's send this to Posterous right now and see what happens; all in the spirit of experimentation naturally.

Posted via email from Gary's Posterous

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