4 ms·

Posterous and URLs

33 points by robotadam 16y ago

petervandijck 16y ago
yea amen to that
pablohoffman 16y ago
I also find annoying that Posterous, for some reason, appends numeric suffixes arbitrarily to certain post slugs (for example: http://blog.pablohoffman.com/hi-posterous-58 http://blog.pablohoffman.com/hi-posterous-58). It's like they have to make the post slug "globally unique", instead of "unique per blog", although they shouldn't have to. It wouldn't be that bad if you could change the slug/url but, as the article correctly points out, you can't.
- rksprst 16y ago
  Google actually wants you to add a unique number to the URLs. It's in one of their FAQs. That's probably why there are doing it (to help with seo on Google).
  - chaosmachine 16y ago
    "Google actually wants you to add a unique number to the URLs." I think you're mistaken.
    - justinchen 16y ago
      I think that used to be a requirement for Google News inclusion, but I heard they dropped it.
      - chaosmachine 16y ago
        Interesting, you're correct: http://www.blogstorm.co.uk/google-news-no-longer-requires-stupid-numbers-in-the-url/ http://www.blogstorm.co.uk/google-news-no-longer-requires-st...
- jrnkntl 16y ago
  This is indeed a namespace thing, every posterous blog uses the same global namespace. They said this will be changed. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1443020 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1443020
  - ydant 16y ago
    There are little quirks in the service that make it seem pretty obvious the (first) custom sub-domains and then (later) custom domains were added on later. The namespace issue seems downright silly until you remember that fact. Now that every blog is on its own subdomain at the least, I'd imagine this could be cleaned up - hopefully with the ability for custom URLs at the same time...
rantfoil 16y ago
This is great feedback. We hope to get this in soon. Thanks very much for the support and suggestions.
fookyong 16y ago
This is one of those "mom do I haaaaave to????" pieces of functionality that engineers (I say this as an engineer-type) hate. I would procrastinate for weeks before implementing something like this. It's boring, complex, and affects a tiny minority of users. However to engineers like me, we have to remember that even though the number of end-users might be small, in this case they are inherently more valuable than the average user. They bring a cache of readers with them and if they like the user experience, can potentially evangelize the product for you more effectively than someone starting a blog from scratch can.
- danieldon 16y ago
  As an engineer, I don't think preserving URLs is a minor issue.
  - jackowayed 16y ago
    He never said it was. He said that it affects a small number of users (because most of Posterous users are starting fresh, not moving from a blog that they actually care about) and that it's complex.
    - jeff18 16y ago
      > most of Posterous users are starting fresh Posterous heavily promotes migrating your blog from other services.
jeff18 16y ago
That would be really interesting if Tumblr and other sites create a posterous importer and everyone is a good 302 redirect citizen. Then you could switch to any service at any point, seamlessly.
- Tichy 16y ago
  It's called DNS.
a4agarwal 16y ago
1. I hope we add this soon 2. I'm going to take my chances among the HN community and say: I think this is low priority because i. Most other services don't even offer import. Posterous offers import from (soon to be) 15+ services. this is not easy ii. Posterous supports all different post/media types so that we can import from so many different services. We put our focus here iii. I care about sharing with my family and friends. They don't care about permanent URLs as much as being able to find my site and search for what they want. cc/google If you are a pro blogger (and maybe you are), and you have major google juice on some URLs, then yes, maybe you care about this. But most people aren't, and don't. There are many reasons why someone should or shouldn't move between competing services on the internet. But urls seems like a very small reason to make that decision. Future services (Posterous or maybe others!) might offer super compelling reasons to move. Not moving because of urls seems like not switching to a Mac because you have all the Windows keyboard shortcuts memorized. In my lifetime, I expect to move between blogging platforms, phone providers, desktop OSs. I will buy different brands of cars, live in different neighborhoods, probably even switch email providers. Yes, there are switching costs. But we hope to minimize them. And more importantly, we hope to focus on adding awesome features so you are willing to incur that switching cost.
- Tichy 16y ago
  Just support moving the URLs. Not that big of a deal. Posted from my MacBook
- jeff18 16y ago
  > Not moving because of urls seems like not switching to a Mac because you have all the Windows keyboard shortcuts memorized. In the spirit of the recent "raw unsolicited advice" to Posterous trend, here are my thoughts: I was impressed when you guys responded saying you were going to add this feature soon. However, playing it down with car, phone, and operating system analogies feels sort of patronizing and makes me worry that you guys might not understand the full scope of the issue: a) You will lose all of your page rank b) Anyone who has linked to you (including yourself) will have a broken link Sure, for some number of users this doesn't matter. For the people who care about it, it is, by definition, very important. What's the point of trying to play down their concern?
jeb 16y ago
Just setup htaccess on your original server to redirect to the new URLs. If you care so much about google juice, then you can spend a day doing this, instead of requiring posterous to solve the problem for you.
- fookyong 16y ago
  how? DNS will resolve to posterous' servers. It's out of your old server's control by that point. Unless you're talking about different domains, e.g. moving from mycoolblog.com self hosted -> myawesomeblog.com on posterous in that case you could do what you said, but I don't think that's what the OP is talking about. the issue is when you use the same domain on both.
JoachimSchipper 16y ago
For the purposes of linking, you could just redirect appropriately from <yourdomain> to www.<yourdomain> or the other way round...
silviasaint2930 16y ago
I\'m happy I found this blog, I couldnt discover any info on this subject matter prior to. I also run a site and if you want to ever serious in a little bit of guest writing for me if possible feel free to let me know, i\'m always look for people to check out my site. Please stop by and leave a comment sometime! http://www.stocktrains.com/ http://www.stocktrains.com/
ydant 16y ago
Agreed. That and dates in URLs (or at least search by date) would be handy. I just migrated a blog over and ran into the same issue. In my case, I was ok with changing domains as well, so I set up a load of redirects on the old one to the new one. It's not a perfect solution and it missed some, but it'll work for now.

33 points by robotadam 16y ago

yea amen to that

I also find annoying that Posterous, for some reason, appends numeric suffixes arbitrarily to certain post slugs (for example: http://blog.pablohoffman.com/hi-posterous-58 http://blog.pablohoffman.com/hi-posterous-58). It's like they have to make the post slug "globally unique", instead of "unique per blog", although they shouldn't have to. It wouldn't be that bad if you could change the slug/url but, as the article correctly points out, you can't.

rksprst 16y ago
Google actually wants you to add a unique number to the URLs. It's in one of their FAQs. That's probably why there are doing it (to help with seo on Google).
- chaosmachine 16y ago
  "Google actually wants you to add a unique number to the URLs." I think you're mistaken.
  - justinchen 16y ago
    I think that used to be a requirement for Google News inclusion, but I heard they dropped it.
    - chaosmachine 16y ago
      Interesting, you're correct: http://www.blogstorm.co.uk/google-news-no-longer-requires-stupid-numbers-in-the-url/ http://www.blogstorm.co.uk/google-news-no-longer-requires-st...
jrnkntl 16y ago
This is indeed a namespace thing, every posterous blog uses the same global namespace. They said this will be changed. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1443020 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1443020
- ydant 16y ago
  There are little quirks in the service that make it seem pretty obvious the (first) custom sub-domains and then (later) custom domains were added on later. The namespace issue seems downright silly until you remember that fact. Now that every blog is on its own subdomain at the least, I'd imagine this could be cleaned up - hopefully with the ability for custom URLs at the same time...

rantfoil 16y ago

This is great feedback. We hope to get this in soon. Thanks very much for the support and suggestions.

fookyong 16y ago

This is one of those "mom do I haaaaave to????" pieces of functionality that engineers (I say this as an engineer-type) hate. I would procrastinate for weeks before implementing something like this. It's boring, complex, and affects a tiny minority of users. However to engineers like me, we have to remember that even though the number of end-users might be small, in this case they are inherently more valuable than the average user. They bring a cache of readers with them and if they like the user experience, can potentially evangelize the product for you more effectively than someone starting a blog from scratch can.

danieldon 16y ago
As an engineer, I don't think preserving URLs is a minor issue.
- jackowayed 16y ago
  He never said it was. He said that it affects a small number of users (because most of Posterous users are starting fresh, not moving from a blog that they actually care about) and that it's complex.
  - jeff18 16y ago
    > most of Posterous users are starting fresh Posterous heavily promotes migrating your blog from other services.

jeff18 16y ago

That would be really interesting if Tumblr and other sites create a posterous importer and everyone is a good 302 redirect citizen. Then you could switch to any service at any point, seamlessly.

Tichy 16y ago
It's called DNS.

a4agarwal 16y ago

1. I hope we add this soon 2. I'm going to take my chances among the HN community and say: I think this is low priority because i. Most other services don't even offer import. Posterous offers import from (soon to be) 15+ services. this is not easy ii. Posterous supports all different post/media types so that we can import from so many different services. We put our focus here iii. I care about sharing with my family and friends. They don't care about permanent URLs as much as being able to find my site and search for what they want. cc/google If you are a pro blogger (and maybe you are), and you have major google juice on some URLs, then yes, maybe you care about this. But most people aren't, and don't. There are many reasons why someone should or shouldn't move between competing services on the internet. But urls seems like a very small reason to make that decision. Future services (Posterous or maybe others!) might offer super compelling reasons to move. Not moving because of urls seems like not switching to a Mac because you have all the Windows keyboard shortcuts memorized. In my lifetime, I expect to move between blogging platforms, phone providers, desktop OSs. I will buy different brands of cars, live in different neighborhoods, probably even switch email providers. Yes, there are switching costs. But we hope to minimize them. And more importantly, we hope to focus on adding awesome features so you are willing to incur that switching cost.

Tichy 16y ago
Just support moving the URLs. Not that big of a deal. Posted from my MacBook
jeff18 16y ago
> Not moving because of urls seems like not switching to a Mac because you have all the Windows keyboard shortcuts memorized. In the spirit of the recent "raw unsolicited advice" to Posterous trend, here are my thoughts: I was impressed when you guys responded saying you were going to add this feature soon. However, playing it down with car, phone, and operating system analogies feels sort of patronizing and makes me worry that you guys might not understand the full scope of the issue: a) You will lose all of your page rank b) Anyone who has linked to you (including yourself) will have a broken link Sure, for some number of users this doesn't matter. For the people who care about it, it is, by definition, very important. What's the point of trying to play down their concern?

jeb 16y ago

Just setup htaccess on your original server to redirect to the new URLs. If you care so much about google juice, then you can spend a day doing this, instead of requiring posterous to solve the problem for you.

fookyong 16y ago
how? DNS will resolve to posterous' servers. It's out of your old server's control by that point. Unless you're talking about different domains, e.g. moving from mycoolblog.com self hosted -> myawesomeblog.com on posterous in that case you could do what you said, but I don't think that's what the OP is talking about. the issue is when you use the same domain on both.

JoachimSchipper 16y ago

For the purposes of linking, you could just redirect appropriately from <yourdomain> to www.<yourdomain> or the other way round...

silviasaint2930 16y ago

I\'m happy I found this blog, I couldnt discover any info on this subject matter prior to. I also run a site and if you want to ever serious in a little bit of guest writing for me if possible feel free to let me know, i\'m always look for people to check out my site. Please stop by and leave a comment sometime! http://www.stocktrains.com/ http://www.stocktrains.com/

ydant 16y ago

Agreed. That and dates in URLs (or at least search by date) would be handy. I just migrated a blog over and ran into the same issue. In my case, I was ok with changing domains as well, so I set up a load of redirects on the old one to the new one. It's not a perfect solution and it missed some, but it'll work for now.