The trouble with Posterous
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.orghttp://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?
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