So as part of my own little personal digital revolution including the building of a new personal website (launch date will follow, we're early in the process), working with more "social" services and generally changing the way I use online services, I've made the choice to run my blog on the posterous service. (I'm not sure when I first thought it acceptable to begin a paragraph with "So" and that is something I'll need to re-educate myself on, sorry!)
A little bit of background is in order.
Back in 2003 my "blog" was little more than a collection of static HTML pages that I'd lovingly hand craft whenever I had something i wanted to share online. In "getting a grip of myself", I learned the ins and outs of
WordPress and went about replacing my static content with a touch of PHP/MySQL goodness. This served me well however, as a bit of a tinkerer and one who just cant leave shit alone, while getting all excited about CFML, I made the choice to port my WordPress blog to
BlogCFC This made perfect sense given I had the run of a ColdFusion server and I was stretching my CFML wings...right up until I discovered
Mango Blog which for a couple of reasons, I prefered the look of and so went about porting my blog over to this new system(also CFML, this one I ran on Railo). I must say that Mango Blog is awesome, I will use it for projects in future with much less hesitancy now that i've spent some considerable time with it working out what makes it tick. So that brings us right up to date where by I've made the choice to port my blog over to a hosted service.
Why on earth would I use a hosted service?Here's the thing. I want to use my blog for...well, blogging. I need a facility that allows me to post from almost anywhere and to post as many different types of media as possible with minimum fuss. I need to know that the domain name I've associated my name with for many years will still be relevant and I need to be able to track who's looking at my blog as well as being able to use the content elsewhere for other purposes in my wee digital revolution. These are all common requirements for people with a blog. So why have I gone to posterous?
Lets take a litte look at what I'd rather not have to do while blogging.As someone who doesn't like to leave stuff alone, the ability to alter parts of my blog, or even to redesign the whole thing on a whim was just too tempting. I need to focus on the content of what I'm posting rather than the next "buzzword" tech that I can integrate into the blog technology. WordPress was particularly distracting in this regard with an endless supply of plugins to keep you fiddling for a long time. The other thing I dont want is any sort of barrier to being able to post content. I just want a straightforward method with no logging in, no navigating around a slow and bloated UI and no other distractions. Point and shoot is what it's all about in my opinion.
And so why posterous and not tumblr?Well, I have a tumblr account also. confused? so was I when I set both up but Ive found uses for both and I really like posterous as a straight up blogging platform. I simply email posterous or use the bookmark and my content is added ready for anyone who cares to read my stuff...no login, no distracting UI and no deviation from what I'm trying to get across. Just a simple, relevent, straight up, no frills platform to post anything that I want to say...I love it.
