Why this blog uses Wordpress now
Posterous is a pretty good idea. You just send an e-mail with your blog text, some photos, video and sound, and they’ll automatically make a nice blog for you, all for free. The photo gallery is also pretty nice.
They even upload your photos to Flickr, Picasa, Facebook, etc., and put your video on Youtube and other video services. They also send notifications on Twitter, and other microblogging sites, and even on social network sites and other blogs. They have an extended list of all the sites they support auto-posting to.
They also support custom domain names, Google Analytics, Feedburner, a bookmarklet and a nice Share on Posterous button. It’s simply amazing.
However, the limitations of Posterous quickly became obvious to me. No options whatsoever to customize the design and the media options are pretty limited.
An example: for my next blog post I want to be able to embed multiple small galleries on different places in the post, as it’s quite a long read. There are no upload facilities on the site, so I just e-mailed all the photos using multiple e-mails for the different galleries. Now I copied the gallery code from the different posts that were generated to the ‘main’ post. It looks something like this:
[[posterous-content:XfwIQTnahWsSQOSZUGMi]]
Thinking that the photo access would be limited to the user account, I thought it was a nice way to add multiple galleries to one post. Wrong: the access to photos is limited to the same post. Still, why use such a complex code with a hash; if the photos are limited to the post, why not use something like:
[[ gallery ]]
Maybe it’s an upcoming feature, maybe it already exists but hidden somewhere (like those crazy tag options in the subject field)..
Anyroad, Wordpress works excellent, it’s a really sound system, and very easy to setup. I’m also quite happy with this minimalistic theme.
In conclusion, Posterous is a fine system for people who ..
- .. don’t understand much of blogging and just want to type some nice stories, optionally with pictures. Useful for the average non-tech person who barely understands e-mail.
- .. want to be able to write a nice photo- or videoblog, very easy to add photos from vacation or a mobile device, just by mailing them. Your various social accounts will be updated too, very nice.
- .. don’t have the time updating the status of all their 10+ social, microblogging and blog accounts and want one nice interface to add things to all of them. Finding out what went wrong with their lives would be a great idea for these people as well.
What do you think? What is your favorite blogging site or system? Do you have suggestions for this blog?
Category: Web | 2 comments »
September 6th, 2009 at 22:37
I used to use Wordpress, but I had nothing to write about. It has really grown since the old days. Habari also seems quite nice though.
PS: Does there really have to be a square box in the upper-right corner of your design? It’s ugly. No really, it is. It almost ruins the rest of your almost perfect looking weblog… a bit. Your way of writing, with lots of paragraphs and lots of whitespace is especially nice.
September 6th, 2009 at 23:00
You really think the box ruins the design? I kinda liked it, it gives a bit of color to the site. Maybe it should only be there on the main page, as the information for a specific blog is rather useless..