Dubber recommends...

If you haven't heard, I've fallen in love with Posterous. Frankly, I think it's the best thing to happen to the web in ages - and I've been using it for a couple of projects recently:

http://justlikejazz.org
http://aftershockproject.com

... and I'll be using it for more upcoming projects, some of which will be quite high profile. I'm a real fan of the service.

In fact, I want to migrate my existing personal Wordpress blog to Posterous... but I'm having real difficulty with it, and it's driving me nuts.

I have a blog at http://andrewdubber.com and I like it a lot, but I'm in love with the Posterous platform. I'd like to merge the two - post by email using Posterous, and have the domain and RSS feed remain the same, with all the old posts added to the new posts in one seamless whole.

As far as I can tell, there are two ways of doing this:

1) Autopost to Wordpress
I can set up the Posterous account to automatically publish anything I send here to my Wordpress based site. The ideal solution, frankly.

2) Import the Wordpress blog
I can import all of my Wordpress posts to this Posterous blog, then change the URL to point at this page rather than my old one. Other than losing the really nice layout of my WP blog, and be satisfied with this almost equally nice Posterous page, there are no real downsides to this, unless something goes drastically wrong with Posterous in the future. I'd be just as happy with this solution, actually.

Trouble is - I've tried both, and neither works the way I'd like it to.

Option one is brilliant until you post a video, audio file or multiple photos. One of the main things I like about Posterous is the way in which it creates photo albums, displays video and makes a little embedded mp3 player. However, if I post those things to Posterous, and it's importing directly into my WP blog, all it says on my site is something like 'Click here to go to Posterous so you can see what's supposed to be here'. Which is worse than useless.

Also, because I have more than one Posterous blog (there's my food blog too, remember?), all of my posts for all of my Posterous blogs will automatically be fed out to my Wordpress site unless I make the others private and password protected. Which I don't want to do. Likewise with Twitter. I'd autopost this blog, but not my food one - but I can't separate them out like that.

Option two is fine, but for two things. I can only import the text of my old posts up to the page break (the 'more' tag) - and everything else after that (ie: the majority of the content) is lost. It doesn't recognise the paragraph breaks either, so all I get is an ugly block of continuous text. And also, I'll lose the original URL structure of my old posts - but I can probably live with that.

So I'm sort of stuck with two blogs. One of them is great because it looks amazing, has years worth of archived stuff in there and is where everyone looks to see what I'm up to. The other is amazing and brilliant in terms of usability, function and so on... and if I had my way, I'd use it as the base of everything I do. But it won't play nicely with Wordpress - either in or out.

Posterous is brilliant for new blogs. It's not something you can easily migrate to.

It's very frustrating, and has resulted in the bizarre situation of me blogging almost in silence using my preferred platform, while the blog that actually has an audience lies idle. Crazy, I know - but I'm determined to figure out a way to make this work satisfactorily.

Any ideas?

I had a few hours to kill today before my flight back to Birmingham, so I wandered around Marseille this morning taking photos. Went to a market, down to the wharf and just around and about.

                                               

Click here to download:

Marseille_on_foot_tag_Marseill.zip (3633 KB)

 I've spent the past four days working on a project in Marseille called Aftershock. It's the second one I've worked on - the first of which was in Genoa, Italy back in June. 

Composer Nitin Sawhney brings together a group of musicians who have never met before from the UK, France and Italy. Over the course of a week, they write, workshop and rehearse a bunch of brand new songs - and it culminates in a one-off performance at the end of that week. This time, it was as part of the Marsatac music festival.

My role is with the website. I helped my friend Stef come up with the concept for the website, and we're trying out ideas, fine tuning it, and trying to put Aftershock online in an original way.

Instead of making a website about Aftershock - either as a brochure or some sort of flyer for the event, we decided that it was more interesting to follow the story of the musicians as characters. Most people would never get the chance to see backstage or to get to know the artists - and nor would they ever have the chance to see where that music comes from and how it develops.

So we put digital video cameras into the hands of the musicians and producers of the event, and it's been my job to take extra footage and bring together all of the material, make sense of it, and assemble it into something that makes some kind of sense.

Essentially, it involves tagging the video by artist name, song title, whether it's a rehearsal, performance, soundcheck - or just the musicians socialising. That's been some of the most interesting stuff: getting to know the real people behind the music.

It's a great experience, it's a really fascinating project and I've made some really good friends as a result of it. I'm considering making the website a compulsory text for my music industries students. It's a real antidote to the idea that the music business is about fame. We may be in a very cool part of the world - but the work's not entirely as glamorous as it may appear on first inspection.

The other thing I want to do with this site is to show people in the music industries how easy it is to make engaging content and put it online. The cameras we used range between £35 and £70 in value - and the website is made using Posterous (as is this site) - which enables you to post anything by email: text, mp3, video, photos and so on.

Have a look at the website. I still have lots more material to sort through and upload - but I'm really pleased with how it's shaping up.

Click here to download:

Jake drums for Martin.M4V (3936 KB)

Jake had a lesson this evening, and Martin Atkins - drummer for Public Image Ltd, Killing Joke, Ministry & Nine Inch Nails - popped in to give him a few pointers...

                                                             

Click here to download:

Scarborough_with_Tim_Jez_and_S.zip (4286 KB)

We set up camp just by the stage door, and captured video, audio, photos and reviews of the concerts, and posted them online as they happened. Rather than simply make videos of the performances, or make a website brochure for the festival, we tried to convey the experience of going to the festival. We interviewed audience members, musicians and organisers - but also gave some of them cameras as well and asked them to simply film or photograph anything they thought was interesting.

One of the real highlights was that a couple of the professional photographers started giving us their content to put on the site, and some of the audience members got in on the act too, contributing their own pictures and video. 

We worked from 10 in the morning to 2 in the morning each day, capturing, encoding, tagging and uploading as much content as we could, and the feedback we had from the thousands (literally) of people who visited the site was that we more than achieved our objective.

We met some amazing people - musicians (including Clint Eastwood's son Kyle...), attendees, and organisers alike - and had a great time exploring Scarborough as well.

There's a hell of a lot of material - and it's all up online. We had a basic idea of what we wanted to do, but improvised once we got there - and we thought that in a way, that approach was just like jazz. So that's what we called the website. Go have a look:

http://justlikejazz.org

It may look like we were on holiday in these photos, but if you check out the website, you'll see how much work we actually did...