I liked Posterous for its e-mail posting, connection to YC, and easy-ish theme editor. Unfortunately, my experience has degraded significantly since I first started blogging regularly on Posterous, with most of the degradation occurring after the acquisition. For example, my embedded YouTube videos demonstrating my Kinect-powered home automation system are no longer embedded in my older blog posts! Modifying old posts isn't cool.
In addition to that, I get a 404 error when trying to manage the posts on my "space," and elements of the web-based post editor are no longer working. Once a post has been edited, it can take hours for it to show up on the blog's main feed. Finally, Posterous pages load very slowly these days. I stopped reporting bugs when I found that my reports were reaching an outsourced customer interaction company rather than an actual Posterous team member.
I wish the Posterous founders well on their future work at Twitter, but needless to say, I'm in the market for a new blog host.
[Too late to edit:] In fairness to Posterous, I should note that my embedded YouTube videos were failing in Linux on both Chrome (no addons) and Firefox (many addons), but seem to be working again in Firefox on Windows (also many addons). So, it could have been a temporary issue related to their database problems.
Once I moved to NYC, I jumped on the Tumblr bandwagon and haven't looked back. My Posterous is gathering dust these days. Especially with the Tumblr iOS app -- it's beautiful and effective.
I don't think tweeting that you've "lost a database" without any additional context is a very good idea. I'm going to guess that they meant the database was temporarily unavailable to their application servers, but it could easily be interpreted to mean that they had suffered massive data loss with no backups.
That's still not something I'd tell my (potentially non-technical) users in a tweet. Something like that deserves a LOT more context than 140 characters.
Don't read into it so much. Losing a database means losing a database. It doesn't imply that there are no backups. Furthermore, how much detail can you really put in 140 characters? A detailed blog post would be nice but if Posterous is a small company with a handful of employees I'd say sending out a Tweet and getting back to work is a better option than spending that time explaining the specifics of what happened. That should come when it's fixed.
By the way, anyone else getting a 503 error when connecting to posterous.com? Are they still down?
Posterous was a great service until a couple of years ago. It was such a neat idea: combine blogging with mailing lists. It was simple and easy.
Then they began to have multiple problems. Email notifications would fail to arrive from time to time. Various over-ajaxed functions, including composing a new post and various administrative pages, stopped working on one or another browser. I had to use Chrome whenever I visited my family blog because things would not render properly in Firefox. Then I had to go back to Firefox because files wouldn't upload properly in Chrome. I suspect the problems had to do with the introduction of the "Spaces" thing, which AFAIK never really took off. I didn't even bother to complain because by that time, I'd stopped Posterous for anything important anyway. Then they were acquired by Twitter, and around the same time, most of the problems I'd been experiencing mysteriously went away.
It's sad to see such a great service slowly killing itself. First they ruined a perfectly working product by slapping half-baked social-networking bullshit on it, and then they got acquired by a company that has little to do with email blogging. On the plus side, they seem to have stopped developed "Spaces" since the acquisition, which probably helped prevent the further introduction of bullshit and unstable features.
i agree - loved posterous until they started the spaces thing
from there it went downhill, have exported by posterous blog into octopress - and havent looked back
if there are any other posterous people looking to jump to octopress i've setup http://p.ostero.us to make the move to markdown/hosted octopress painless
Posterous seemed - like twitter - perfect because of it's simplicity. Email meets blogging.
I think spaces made it sort of awkward and was disappointed that it essentially stopped development since being acquired by twitter. I'm starting to wish these acqui-hires were more focused on improving the product rather than just getting the programming team to work on completely different products.
I hope they publish a post-mortem when all is resolved, it'd be an interesting read. I remember hearing that they had a fairly complex mix of MySQL, Riak, and Varnish caching, in what sounded like a reasonably well-thought-out design.
Also, there's probably a fail-whale joke in here somewhere :-)
whats the best way to dump all my content ? I've looked at their json api but was hoping someone has written an easy script to convert this to something usable to replace my blog/personal page.
I'm a big fan of octopress now, which is just jekyll with some rake tasks and plugins already set up to make things even easier to get started.. https://github.com/imathis/octopress
I can attest to doing the same. Now i'm on jekyll+S3 and haven't looked back - it's great! Having said that, the jekyll posterous image exporter i couldn't get to work. But i don't post many photos so that didn't worry me.
I'm looking into the API to export users and subscribers, once I have that will be all. (Right now the posterous api site is down)
However I must say, I'm not happily moving out, I love posterous, I will miss email integration, and user management. It's nothing that I can made by myself, but was nice having that features with out developing.
PD: There is also this guy → https://exportmyposts.jazzychad.net/ that made a more complete backup using posterous API, you can buy it starting from 9$us. There is nothing someone can develop using the posterous API
I have written a small static blog engine/cms which can (or at least could) export your blog from Posterous. You'll get it out as html, I think. https://github.com/hanssonlarsson/diurna
In addition to that, I get a 404 error when trying to manage the posts on my "space," and elements of the web-based post editor are no longer working. Once a post has been edited, it can take hours for it to show up on the blog's main feed. Finally, Posterous pages load very slowly these days. I stopped reporting bugs when I found that my reports were reaching an outsourced customer interaction company rather than an actual Posterous team member.
I wish the Posterous founders well on their future work at Twitter, but needless to say, I'm in the market for a new blog host.