10 ms·

Posterous will turn off on April 30

301 points by brownday 14y ago

bobdylan1 14y ago
Is it possible to get a backup of the YC posterous.. or are they moving it?
- tokenadult 14y ago
  Yes, I hope that the pages that were on YC Posterous find another home online, with a redirect sent to search engines before Posterous shuts down.
  - pg 14y ago
    We're moving to Posthaven.
s800 14y ago
crap.
akurilin 14y ago
Any solid alternatives HN could recommend?
- wyck 14y ago
  Jekyll with https://github.com/bhollis/maruku https://github.com/bhollis/maruku for markdown on steroids.
- jbail 14y ago
  Wordpress. That might sound obvious, but it works and it's easy to setup. I left Posterous after they launched Spaces and went back to hosting my own Wordpress install. I host about 20 low traffic sites on a single Bluehost.com shared server that costs under $100 per year. Never had any issues. One click Wordpress install via SimpleScripts. It really doesn't get any easier.
  - ahoyhere 14y ago
    Seconded. My first regularly updated site in 96 was updated by hand; then I created a daily news site that was custom-roll; then I moved to Movable Type; then I custom-rolled again; somewhere in there I tried Drupal (for a year or so, not just a dalliance); then I used whatever RoR blogging engine was popular; then I got real and moved to Wordpress several years ago and haven't regretted it for more than a couple seconds, here and there. And those seconds of regret were more than made up for by the lack of crap I had to do myself. (And, naturally, nobody can shut MY wordpress blog down since I ran it on my own server and now WPEngine.)
  - sbierwagen 14y ago
    http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=wordpress http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=wordpress
    - mkr-hn 14y ago
      Ctrl+F, type plugin
      - sbierwagen 14y ago
        http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=php http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=php
        mkr-hn 14y ago
        A quick skim shows a lot of applications that use PHP and some libraries available with or for PHP. What does this have to do with WordPress?
  - rscale 14y ago
    I did the same after the acquisition was first announced. It took about an hour to get it running, and fully monitored by my Nagios installation.
  - pjmlp 14y ago
- mikec3k 14y ago
  According to that blog post, WordPress & SquareSpace have importers.
- bsg75 14y ago
  Scriptogr.am
- liangzan 14y ago
  octopress on github pages
- masnick 14y ago
  I wrote about different ways to set up a reliable blog about a year ago. The post is still relevant, except I'd add SquareSpace as a good option and obviously remove the part about Posterous. See http://www.maxmasnick.com/articles/bulletproof_your_blog http://www.maxmasnick.com/articles/bulletproof_your_blog
- feint 14y ago
  Not really a direct alternative as it's only for single posts, but I better plug Pen.io
- garry 14y ago
  Posthaven. If you liked Posterous, I promise you will like Posthaven. I was one of the cofounders of Posterous and wrote much of the site. Brett joined us as a cofounder and we really enjoyed working on it. The difference this time is that we'll be 100% sustainable, and we are pledging to keep the site online forever. It's just me and Brett coding it right now. http://posthaven.com http://posthaven.com
  - swilliams 14y ago
    Getting a 503 Service Unavailable.
  - joedev 14y ago
    "Electric word life, it means 4ever and that's a mighty long time" Forever is longer than a lifetime and we've seen how well just simple "lifetime" hosting promises go.
  - ukd1 14y ago
    I'm moving here, looks awesome and love what Garry's doing with it :-)
  - MatthewPhillips 14y ago
    Does it have posting by email like Posterous?
  - jveg 14y ago
    I paid the $5. You better not disappoint, Garry! :)
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
- pekk 14y ago
  Use a static site generator and then deploy to any low-cost static host (e.g., CloudFront). Odds are that you really don't need a dynamic backend when you can just deploy new static files for each update.
- djloche 14y ago
  http://everyone.me/ http://everyone.me/ - utilizes dropbox
  - moioci 14y ago
    requires $5 per month subscription.
- drgolden 14y ago
  nwzPaper
jxf 14y ago
The handwriting was on the wall for this when Posterous built data export: http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/12/28/twitter-own-posterous-finally-lets-users-to-back-up-their-data-will-it-now-close-down-in-2013/ http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/12/28/twitter-own-postero... I do give them a lot of credit for providing a means to export data (albeit a somewhat clunky one), because way too many services simply shut down without providing a reasonable way to get your data out. Will also be interesting to see what the "key initiatives" that Posterous will be doing at Twitter are: http://blog.twitter.com/2012/03/welcoming-posterous-team-to-flock.html http://blog.twitter.com/2012/03/welcoming-posterous-team-to-...
- a4agarwal 14y ago
  We want to make sure our users can move to other sites easily. If you have suggestions for our exporter, please let me know The XML file in our export can be uploaded to Wordpress.
  - n9com 14y ago
    This is going to ravage blog links on search engines. Not sure why this wasn't announced a year back (although it was widely known this would happen eventually).
  - jacquesm 14y ago
    What are the rough operating costs of posterous? If you want we could discuss keeping it alive rather than shutting it down (like what I've been doing with http://www.Reocities.com/ http://www.Reocities.com/). I don't like large gaping holes in the web.
    - nikcub 14y ago
      Instead of setting up a longer living backup for each case, it would be interesting to setup a generic storage mirror and a corporate foundation that can keep these sites alive. When a startup shuts down a product, they can donate the domain name or point it to the mirror to keep it alive. Something like archive.org, with some donated servers and a couple of people working on it. Twitter and other acquirers usually only want the team, and this is happening more and more. We are losing large parts of the web. I wouldn't be surprised if less than 1% of Posterous is exported and goes to live on in other forms. Either way the URLs and links all die.
helipad 14y ago
As a product I was always impressed by the just email, no setup approach. With the current trend towards people posting one-off or irregular essays instead of full-featured blogs, it seems as if they veered away from the simple email posting route too soon. What was once an interesting approach to blogging was pivoted into a samey metaservice with nothing notable for me.
- ldng 14y ago
  "they veered away from the simple email posting" IMHO, as a product, this is where they lost their way. This is when I stopped caring. Yet maybe this is where they had to go for a successful exit (read $$$). I don't know.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- r0s 14y ago
  It was a great, innovative platform. Media handling was excellent. I'm sorry to see them go.
chrisacky 14y ago
To be totally honest, I'm surprised it's taken this long. Everyone knew a year ago when they were acquihired that Posterous would be discontinued. Why do I say this? Well, Twitter's bread and butter is in 140 characters, if they wanted to look at branching out into micro-blogging they wouldn't need to acquire a company, of whom the majority of their customers already use Twitter. (It was borderline a zero-value gain for Twitter if you take out Posterous' talent) As it stands now, Tumblr clearly won (Although there has been a few emerging startups of insignificant size. Soup.io is one that springs to mind that is currently in an accelerator). If you are looking for hosted solutions for your startup's blog (or you are at all technical), I'd genuinely think about using GitHub. Start to pull your posts from Posterous and use a static content generator. Jekyll / Punch / Middleman / Hyde / Korma / nanonc / Frank + (any of the other 10 static generators).. The operative point from using services that generate static content is that you are always in control of your plain-text content. Just push your new post and GitHub will handle your site. If you are worried about traffic on your site or extended build periods (I believe GH does rate limit static sites, and as a comment below mentions, on infrequent occasions builds can take upwards of several hours) then you can still use any other solution... Push to Amazon S3 and proxy through Cloudfront, then you will have probably one of the fastest, geographically distributed blogs on the internet. This was always happening... Especially when you consider that for the last 12 months I haven't seen a single new feature since they were acquired. I've logged in, see the same "Posterous has been acquired" header for the last 12 months. Move on, and safeguard your future content.
- pnathan 14y ago
  Yeah, I figured this would happen... but I had hoped that it wouldn't ( I have a couple posterous sites). Ah well. Guess I know what I'm doing this weekend.
- bitcartel 14y ago
  Wordpress is for bloggers, Github is for developers. Why not keep things simple?
  - minimaxir 14y ago
markkofman 14y ago
anybody looking to offload Posterous blog into Tumblr - try http://www.import2.com/tumblr http://www.import2.com/tumblr
- erdogan 14y ago
  Free alternative?
fascinated 14y ago
Obligatory link to "Posterous launches new tools to switch from dying platforms: A new importer per day for the next 15 days" http://blog.posterous.com/make-the-switch-to-posterous http://blog.posterous.com/make-the-switch-to-posterous
- albemuth 14y ago
  Yes, the Schadenfreude
- filmgirlcw 14y ago
  Right! And when I wrote up that newsstand the time and noted that Posterous made it really hard to get your data out, as I recall I got a REALLY bitchy email from one of the founders.
  - jveg 14y ago
    We couldn't win either way. I got a super pissy email from David because he thought I was covering Posterous too much, as I think you recall.
    - filmgirlcw 14y ago
      Indeed! As you said, we were screwed either way!
      - fascinated 14y ago
        oh dear :/
kristianc 14y ago
>> If you want to move your site to another service, WordPress and Squarespace offer importers that can move all of your content over to either service. Just remember: you need to back up your Spaces by April 30. Oh the irony. Karma's a bitch, huh?
vegashacker 14y ago
They should probably update this header: This is where we post about new features on Posterous Spaces. You can get a Posterous Space just like this by emailing post@posterous.com or signing up for a new account.
hmans 14y ago
http://sloblog.io/ http://sloblog.io/ - simple, responsive layout, Markdown everywhere, syntax highlighting, BrowserID/Persona-based signup, native comments + subscriptions, JSON export. Coming soon: full API (someone's already building an iOS app on it), anonymous posting, authenticating against Twitter (not just Persona), Flattr integration. No ads _ever_, monetization through Flattr, and I may eventually do a full open-source release. (My business is in training and consulting, not in running websites.) Enjoy.
bfe 14y ago
I'd suspected as much based on the decline in performance and the vanishing of the previously wonderful customer support.
dylangs1030 14y ago
I really dislike that startups are acquired so often just so they are discontinued by larger companies. It feels very disingenuous. As if the only point is to be acquired and get a sizable amount of money.
- Jaigus 14y ago
  It seems it is the only point in many cases. As an example, consider the vast amount of superfluous twitter-helper apps that were endlessly sprouting up a couple of years ago. I don't think many of them were seriously intending on starting a legitimate business out of a web application that helps twitter users keep track of the followers that didn't follow them back.
  - dylangs1030 14y ago
    I don't mind striking it rich with technology. But I think a part of me would hate to see my blood, sweat and tears poured down the drain by a large company intent on remaining where they are (not that Twitter did exactly this but you get my meaning).
bambax 14y ago
> We’d like to thank the millions of Posterous users who have supported us on our incredible journey. Yeah, right. How was that "incredible", BTW? I feel I've read that same story many many times. As a Posterous user, I'm so glad I used my own domain.
- harryh 14y ago
  Oh come on, have some empathy! They started their own business. They gave it a go! They had a decent degree of success. Just because they didn't make it work doesn't mean it's ok to be so dismissive.
  - bambax 14y ago
    They are the ones lacking empathy! Did you read the OP? They left their users out to dry, and instead of telling them (us) that they are sorry and that maybe they understand our situation of being burned yet again, they sound like they're very happy with themselves, "building features to help [us] discover and share what’s happening in the world – on an even larger scale". I don't even know what that means. You may argue that the world doesn't end with Posterous shutting down, and you'd be right. But the tone of that post is not ok.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
danso 14y ago
This has only been mentioned once in the thread, but if Jekyll seems like too much work to setup, I highly, highly recommend Octopress: http://octopress.org/ http://octopress.org/ It's based off of Jekyll but handles a lot of the boilerplate, including rake tasks to deploy to Github pages. I've been following the github/octopress project for awhile and have seen a lot of activity in the past few weeks, so hopefully version 2.1 is just around the corner. edit: Also, as a Tumblr user (for my photoblog), I would not recommend using Tumblr for those who are into technical/indepth writing. The set of HTML you can use is limited...for example, I don't think tables are allowed. Its social network of sharing is also more suited toward visual blogs, not ones of deep content.
- sbilik 14y ago
  I like the idea of Octopress and Jekyll, but the few times I've tried them, it seems that they don't easily scale. My blog has over 2900 entries. Build from scratch. chug chug chug That I understand. Now add a new entry and try to get an incremental rebuild in less than 30 seconds. Has anyone tackled this in either project??
  - glesica 14y ago
    I use a makefile. Only rebuilds the pages that have been added / modified (which, of course is the point of a makefile in general).
    - sbilik 14y ago
      I'm a bit unclear. Do you use a makefile instead of Jekyll/Octopress? Or somehow in combination with it? Yes, I do remember that years ago I read about a static web management system that was makefile-centric, but think it lost popularity as more advanced CMS's came out. Also I have trouble thinking about how a makefile can help you manage the 'Prev' and 'Next" attributes on a page. This is, not only make HTML from the page I just generated, but also go back to the previous writeup and update it to add a 'Next' link to it.
      - 14y ago
dave1619 14y ago
Can somebody please help me out? I'm confused here. I thought Posterous (before being acquired by Twitter) was doing quite well and was seen as the biggest competitor to Tumbler. It would seem that Posterous had a ton of users (would love to know details) and that they could monetize those users fairly simply through display ads. So, with a ton of users creating content and even more viewing that content, I would imagine it to be a pretty good business model. What confuses me is that rumor has it that Posterous was sold for $10m. I really don't understand that. That basically is treating all of posterous.com users/content as worthless, and just buying the team. And it appears that Twitter did think like that (considering that posterous.com is shutting down). But my question is how many users did posterous have? What was their traffic like? Were they doing well, or were they a sinking ship and thus they sold? Or did Twitter offer much more than $10m (maybe stock options worth 30-40m more?)? I'd like to know because I think it would be helpful for startups to understand this space (blogging, content creation) and what kind of business models work and what kind of traffic is needed to make a successful business. So, if there is anybody with inside knowledge on this stuff, please speak up. I'd also love to hear directly from the Posterous co-founders. Please share your experiences.
- jff 14y ago
  I don't think I have ever viewed any content on Posterous. I didn't even know what it does until I started reading these comments. On the other hand, I get sent Tumblr links daily. Multiple times a day. If Posterous is the biggest competitor to Tumblr, it seems that says Tumblr has no real competition.
- jsnk 14y ago
  You can't compare Posterous to Tumblr in terms of user base. Tumblr is in top 50 websites in the world. I doubt that Posterous even cracked top 500.
  - dave1619 14y ago
    Sure, but if they were able to get into the top 500 shouldn't that be a business worth more than $10m? Especially since it's user created content, and if they do it right they could keep rising in the ranks of top sites. I'm curious if they were experiencing a growth stall or even negative growth before selling. Because if they were growing, I don't understand why they would sell and abandon their product unless the offer was ridiculously high.
dendory 14y ago
This is yet another reminder of how important it is to own your content, and why a blog is best hosted at a domain you control.
- arketyp 14y ago
  I distinctly remember reassuring myself when I created my blog one year ago that there is no way Twitter would leave out the option to download your data if they decided to kill off Posterous. It would just be way too bad PR.
nell 14y ago
Services that don't get traction shutdown. Services that get traction and become successful eventually shutdown anyway. I wonder whats the point of investing my time in a free service.
kintamanimatt 14y ago
This is probably one of those times when we can thank the Internet Archive for preserving the internet that's no longer with us, or, in this case, the part of the internet that's about to go dark.
przemoc 14y ago
When Posterous emerged I had high hopes for it. My first post was quite enthusiastic. http://przemoc.posterous.com/rouse-e-by-post-ie-why-i-am-here-at-posterous http://przemoc.posterous.com/rouse-e-by-post-ie-why-i-am-her... But I quickly understood that their service wasn't meant to improve at all. Every problem I reported to them was dismissed (directly or indirectly). So I created following page to warn the others. http://faulty.posterous.com/ http://faulty.posterous.com/ I thought about the idea of posting via (plain-text) mail seriously, but they weren't sharing my mindset. I left posterous long time ago (well, my CNAME still points there, have to fix it...) and I see it was a wise decision. Rule #0 of the internet: you have to constantly backup it!
- johnnyn 14y ago
  This isn't fair at all. Posterous was very responsive to user feedback and reported bugs. Posterous engineers spent much of their time answering support emails directly and finding solutions for users. As a matter of fact, support emails go directly to engineers inboxes. Perhaps the problem was that there just weren't enough engineers. Posterous may not have found a way to make money but the site was definitely meant to improve IMHO. Email, Groups, Spaces, slideshows, sharing to multiple social networks -- the list goes on.
  - przemoc 14y ago
    It was all about some bells and whistles, if anything. Email - barely half-baked feature and my biggest problem with Posterous, as initially it was their most hyped core feature (and I believed them). Spaces it's just ol' plain Posterous, they enhanced the name for some vague reasons. Groups is nothing special. Slideshows - another lightbox variant. Sharing to multiple social networks - buggy. The list goes on? So bring it. Meanwhile, I'll bring my own. Posterous was moderately responsive at most, but e-mail responsiveness and fixing/improving the site and its functionality are different things. Even CEO may be responding to my mails, but it means nothing if it doesn't change a bit of the outcome. I guess the problem was that they had their own vision and roadmap paved with features that will have the biggest impact. They were simply unwilling to pay attention to anything else. It would be fine, really, if they stated it clearly from the beginning. 1. Initially Suyash responded to my first mail (appraisal; asking for markdown inline images, feedburner mybrand and introduction of commenting system such as intense debate). It looked like: "Thanks for your wonderful email and detailed feedback. I'll pass on some of your suggestions to the team." 2. Second thread (Identi.ca autopost and unwanted location disclosure) didn't get any response. 3. Third thread (wrong URL of the post being previously private and with the title changed before becoming publicized, i.e. premature public URL generation) "We'll look into changing this behavior in a future update." 4. Fourth thread ( doesn't work with markdown, editor doesn't switch to markdown mode immediately, even though the post was written in markdown, no setting for making markdown the default mail posting style) didn't get any response. 5. In my mail starting the fifth thread (1 month later) I collected existing problems. Response, this time from Rick: re commenting system - "Very few have asked for this, so it is unlikely that we will implement without a lot more support." re url prematurely created - "I'm not sure I understand your question." re edit in markdown mode immediately - "this is in our queue" re  equivalent in markdown - "I will check on status of this to make sure it is added the next time we update this feature" re automarkdown mail - "this is in our queue" re markdown inline images - "this is in our queue" My response got no response, so 3 weeks later I asked about any progress. "Unfortunately, no meaningful progress - these are on our list, but not yet high enough on the priority queue for us to work on yet." I ask again 2.5 months later. "Your requests are still on our feature list, but not many people have requested them so they are not prioritized very highly. We're a small team with a lot still to add and are trying to focus on the features that will have the biggest impact." Finally I was so frustrated that I suggested working myself on some of bugs/lacking features (free of charge, maybe t-shirt or something) as they are mostly easy to implement. I wrote also that it's sad that identi.ca problem was not solved. "Thanks so much for your offer to help - to clarify, we did look at the identica problem and it's on our list too. Unfortunately, we can't easily open up our code to outside developers right now." I mailed them no more, as you know, it was pointless. For some time there was a forum available, when people reported their problems, bugs, etc. It was all the same - "it's in our queue, but not high enough." --- Conclusions Be honest - if you don't want to fix reported problems and hear about even simple enhancements, as you won't implement them how trivial they are (because it doesn't fit into your vision or whatever, I don't know), just say it clearly in public (on the page) or at least private (in the first response, I wouldn't bother you anymore). The tragedy of the present times is mediocrity in everything, but software and web services in particular. Let's add some new flashy features no matter how buggy the rest is. Hopefully laymen will think that it supposed to be like that and technicians can be ignored - they are negligible minority.
Tawheed 14y ago
If I Was CEO of Posterous (written in 2010) http://www.tawheedkader.com/2010/06/if-i-was-ceo-of-posterous/ http://www.tawheedkader.com/2010/06/if-i-was-ceo-of-posterou...
marizmelo 14y ago
Not a surprise. I saw posterous as a better option for Tumblr, but after they create the "spaces" version I felt like lost. The original idea it was simple and worked, but after they got traction I think they lost the vision, and after twitter bought them they totally mess up. Well, good luck at twitter.
nonamegiven 14y ago
Regardless of where you physically host your blog, or email, or other service, use your own domain name. That way acquisitions don't matter for your readers and correspondence, just move and no one's the wiser.
aerolite 14y ago
Wow, I never saw that coming :(
desireco42 14y ago
Posterous might not have been as big as Tumblr, but it was big. It was obvious it's management had some lack of vision, since introducing Spaces and other confusing additions. Even with all this, it is completely confusing to me seeing it sold to Twitter and just shutting down service. I personally will not believe to use any service made by those guys, especially Posthaven looks ridiculous in light of how Posterous got miss-managed. Having said all this, I am not judging founders for selling out, I think they did a good thing and it is their absolutely their right, probably could've gotten way more from someone else, but it's their decision, as online user, I just can't touch anything they make.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
mdip 14y ago
Funny thing, I remember clicking links on HN years ago and seeing the Posterous tab in the upper right corner of my screen. But it's been a long time. It kinda brought me back to what was the not-so-distant-past. Just one suggestion: When discontinuing a product, eliminate the link in the upper right that says "Join SPACES". It's a little thing. And nobody expects anyone to design product "un"-launches the way they design product launches.
jwmoz 14y ago
Nooooooooo. My blog! http://blog.jmoz.co.uk http://blog.jmoz.co.uk Best replacement, wordpress? Need to 301 everything :/
xfax 14y ago
These sort of shenanigans make me wary of using any service that has raised a considerable amount of external funding. Believe it or not, VCs (as opposed to angels) are only in it to get a good return. This frequently forces companies to sell out at the detriment to their customers (given the lack of IPOs as a viable exit option). I get that the founders are in it to make money as well, but don't expect anyone to use your service knowing well that you could just choose to sell out tomorrow. I wonder if we studied funded start ups over the last 10 years, whether we'll see a pattern of selling out and then discontinuing service.
- jonpeda 14y ago
  angels don't want return?
  - xfax 14y ago
    They do, but they are investing their own money and can choose to value whatever they please (e.g. Social responsibility). VC firms on the other hand have a fiduciary responsibility to their limited partners to maximize returns.
weddingcakes 14y ago
Shame, lots of good posts on Posterous blogs.
kstrauser 14y ago
I went the static site route (shout out to Blogofile (http://www.blogofile.com http://www.blogofile.com) because I didn't trust anyone but me to run my server and I got tired of running Wordpress and Drupal myself. I paid NearlyFreeSpeech.NET $20 a year ago to host the static files and have about half that still credited to my account. OK, it's not for everyone. Initial setup certainly wasn't for the faint of heart. But it was fun and replacing my host is as easy as finding another cheap host for text files and jpegs. It was worth it to me.
minhajuddin 14y ago
Simple solution for developers who are bloggers https://substancehq.com/ https://substancehq.com/
pootch 14y ago
What a garbage site. So glad they are gone. I guess now they get to sell all the personal information they collected without permission at bargain rates.
jakozaur 14y ago
Nooooo! Why so many simple useful products, that I would be happy to pay for are simple closed after aquihires. I know that this may be good for founders, but it let me against trying new companies which doesn't have a clear monetization strategy.
fiendsan 14y ago
true dat, it was just a matter of time! but i think its their loss, you create a brand and service that was really liked, i think selling it out to someone else to develop would be the most beneficial!
erdogan 14y ago
Any wisdom on how to import posterous content into tumblr? Posterous's auto post is not working for me anymore.

301 points by brownday 14y ago

bobdylan1 14y ago

Is it possible to get a backup of the YC posterous.. or are they moving it?

tokenadult 14y ago
Yes, I hope that the pages that were on YC Posterous find another home online, with a redirect sent to search engines before Posterous shuts down.
- pg 14y ago
  We're moving to Posthaven.

s800 14y ago

crap.

akurilin 14y ago

Any solid alternatives HN could recommend?

wyck 14y ago
Jekyll with https://github.com/bhollis/maruku https://github.com/bhollis/maruku for markdown on steroids.
jbail 14y ago
Wordpress. That might sound obvious, but it works and it's easy to setup. I left Posterous after they launched Spaces and went back to hosting my own Wordpress install. I host about 20 low traffic sites on a single Bluehost.com shared server that costs under $100 per year. Never had any issues. One click Wordpress install via SimpleScripts. It really doesn't get any easier.
- ahoyhere 14y ago
  Seconded. My first regularly updated site in 96 was updated by hand; then I created a daily news site that was custom-roll; then I moved to Movable Type; then I custom-rolled again; somewhere in there I tried Drupal (for a year or so, not just a dalliance); then I used whatever RoR blogging engine was popular; then I got real and moved to Wordpress several years ago and haven't regretted it for more than a couple seconds, here and there. And those seconds of regret were more than made up for by the lack of crap I had to do myself. (And, naturally, nobody can shut MY wordpress blog down since I ran it on my own server and now WPEngine.)
- sbierwagen 14y ago
  http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=wordpress http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=wordpress
  - mkr-hn 14y ago
    Ctrl+F, type plugin
    - sbierwagen 14y ago
      http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=php http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=php
      - mkr-hn 14y ago
        A quick skim shows a lot of applications that use PHP and some libraries available with or for PHP. What does this have to do with WordPress?
- rscale 14y ago
  I did the same after the acquisition was first announced. It took about an hour to get it running, and fully monitored by my Nagios installation.
- pjmlp 14y ago
mikec3k 14y ago
According to that blog post, WordPress & SquareSpace have importers.
bsg75 14y ago
Scriptogr.am
liangzan 14y ago
octopress on github pages
masnick 14y ago
I wrote about different ways to set up a reliable blog about a year ago. The post is still relevant, except I'd add SquareSpace as a good option and obviously remove the part about Posterous. See http://www.maxmasnick.com/articles/bulletproof_your_blog http://www.maxmasnick.com/articles/bulletproof_your_blog
feint 14y ago
Not really a direct alternative as it's only for single posts, but I better plug Pen.io
garry 14y ago
Posthaven. If you liked Posterous, I promise you will like Posthaven. I was one of the cofounders of Posterous and wrote much of the site. Brett joined us as a cofounder and we really enjoyed working on it. The difference this time is that we'll be 100% sustainable, and we are pledging to keep the site online forever. It's just me and Brett coding it right now. http://posthaven.com http://posthaven.com
- swilliams 14y ago
  Getting a 503 Service Unavailable.
- joedev 14y ago
  "Electric word life, it means 4ever and that's a mighty long time" Forever is longer than a lifetime and we've seen how well just simple "lifetime" hosting promises go.
- ukd1 14y ago
  I'm moving here, looks awesome and love what Garry's doing with it :-)
- MatthewPhillips 14y ago
  Does it have posting by email like Posterous?
- jveg 14y ago
  I paid the $5. You better not disappoint, Garry! :)
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
pekk 14y ago
Use a static site generator and then deploy to any low-cost static host (e.g., CloudFront). Odds are that you really don't need a dynamic backend when you can just deploy new static files for each update.
djloche 14y ago
http://everyone.me/ http://everyone.me/ - utilizes dropbox
- moioci 14y ago
  requires $5 per month subscription.
drgolden 14y ago
nwzPaper

jxf 14y ago

The handwriting was on the wall for this when Posterous built data export: http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/12/28/twitter-own-posterous-finally-lets-users-to-back-up-their-data-will-it-now-close-down-in-2013/ http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/12/28/twitter-own-postero... I do give them a lot of credit for providing a means to export data (albeit a somewhat clunky one), because way too many services simply shut down without providing a reasonable way to get your data out. Will also be interesting to see what the "key initiatives" that Posterous will be doing at Twitter are: http://blog.twitter.com/2012/03/welcoming-posterous-team-to-flock.html http://blog.twitter.com/2012/03/welcoming-posterous-team-to-...

a4agarwal 14y ago
We want to make sure our users can move to other sites easily. If you have suggestions for our exporter, please let me know The XML file in our export can be uploaded to Wordpress.
- n9com 14y ago
  This is going to ravage blog links on search engines. Not sure why this wasn't announced a year back (although it was widely known this would happen eventually).
- jacquesm 14y ago
  What are the rough operating costs of posterous? If you want we could discuss keeping it alive rather than shutting it down (like what I've been doing with http://www.Reocities.com/ http://www.Reocities.com/). I don't like large gaping holes in the web.
  - nikcub 14y ago
    Instead of setting up a longer living backup for each case, it would be interesting to setup a generic storage mirror and a corporate foundation that can keep these sites alive. When a startup shuts down a product, they can donate the domain name or point it to the mirror to keep it alive. Something like archive.org, with some donated servers and a couple of people working on it. Twitter and other acquirers usually only want the team, and this is happening more and more. We are losing large parts of the web. I wouldn't be surprised if less than 1% of Posterous is exported and goes to live on in other forms. Either way the URLs and links all die.

helipad 14y ago

As a product I was always impressed by the just email, no setup approach. With the current trend towards people posting one-off or irregular essays instead of full-featured blogs, it seems as if they veered away from the simple email posting route too soon. What was once an interesting approach to blogging was pivoted into a samey metaservice with nothing notable for me.

ldng 14y ago
"they veered away from the simple email posting" IMHO, as a product, this is where they lost their way. This is when I stopped caring. Yet maybe this is where they had to go for a successful exit (read $$$). I don't know.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
r0s 14y ago
It was a great, innovative platform. Media handling was excellent. I'm sorry to see them go.

chrisacky 14y ago

To be totally honest, I'm surprised it's taken this long. Everyone knew a year ago when they were acquihired that Posterous would be discontinued. Why do I say this? Well, Twitter's bread and butter is in 140 characters, if they wanted to look at branching out into micro-blogging they wouldn't need to acquire a company, of whom the majority of their customers already use Twitter. (It was borderline a zero-value gain for Twitter if you take out Posterous' talent) As it stands now, Tumblr clearly won (Although there has been a few emerging startups of insignificant size. Soup.io is one that springs to mind that is currently in an accelerator). If you are looking for hosted solutions for your startup's blog (or you are at all technical), I'd genuinely think about using GitHub. Start to pull your posts from Posterous and use a static content generator. Jekyll / Punch / Middleman / Hyde / Korma / nanonc / Frank + (any of the other 10 static generators).. The operative point from using services that generate static content is that you are always in control of your plain-text content. Just push your new post and GitHub will handle your site. If you are worried about traffic on your site or extended build periods (I believe GH does rate limit static sites, and as a comment below mentions, on infrequent occasions builds can take upwards of several hours) then you can still use any other solution... Push to Amazon S3 and proxy through Cloudfront, then you will have probably one of the fastest, geographically distributed blogs on the internet. This was always happening... Especially when you consider that for the last 12 months I haven't seen a single new feature since they were acquired. I've logged in, see the same "Posterous has been acquired" header for the last 12 months. Move on, and safeguard your future content.

pnathan 14y ago
Yeah, I figured this would happen... but I had hoped that it wouldn't ( I have a couple posterous sites). Ah well. Guess I know what I'm doing this weekend.
bitcartel 14y ago
Wordpress is for bloggers, Github is for developers. Why not keep things simple?
- minimaxir 14y ago

markkofman 14y ago

anybody looking to offload Posterous blog into Tumblr - try http://www.import2.com/tumblr http://www.import2.com/tumblr

erdogan 14y ago
Free alternative?

fascinated 14y ago

Obligatory link to "Posterous launches new tools to switch from dying platforms: A new importer per day for the next 15 days" http://blog.posterous.com/make-the-switch-to-posterous http://blog.posterous.com/make-the-switch-to-posterous

albemuth 14y ago
Yes, the Schadenfreude
filmgirlcw 14y ago
Right! And when I wrote up that newsstand the time and noted that Posterous made it really hard to get your data out, as I recall I got a REALLY bitchy email from one of the founders.
- jveg 14y ago
  We couldn't win either way. I got a super pissy email from David because he thought I was covering Posterous too much, as I think you recall.
  - filmgirlcw 14y ago
    Indeed! As you said, we were screwed either way!
    - fascinated 14y ago
      oh dear :/

kristianc 14y ago

>> If you want to move your site to another service, WordPress and Squarespace offer importers that can move all of your content over to either service. Just remember: you need to back up your Spaces by April 30. Oh the irony. Karma's a bitch, huh?

vegashacker 14y ago

They should probably update this header: This is where we post about new features on Posterous Spaces. You can get a Posterous Space just like this by emailing post@posterous.com or signing up for a new account.

hmans 14y ago

http://sloblog.io/ http://sloblog.io/ - simple, responsive layout, Markdown everywhere, syntax highlighting, BrowserID/Persona-based signup, native comments + subscriptions, JSON export. Coming soon: full API (someone's already building an iOS app on it), anonymous posting, authenticating against Twitter (not just Persona), Flattr integration. No ads _ever_, monetization through Flattr, and I may eventually do a full open-source release. (My business is in training and consulting, not in running websites.) Enjoy.

bfe 14y ago

I'd suspected as much based on the decline in performance and the vanishing of the previously wonderful customer support.

dylangs1030 14y ago

I really dislike that startups are acquired so often just so they are discontinued by larger companies. It feels very disingenuous. As if the only point is to be acquired and get a sizable amount of money.

Jaigus 14y ago
It seems it is the only point in many cases. As an example, consider the vast amount of superfluous twitter-helper apps that were endlessly sprouting up a couple of years ago. I don't think many of them were seriously intending on starting a legitimate business out of a web application that helps twitter users keep track of the followers that didn't follow them back.
- dylangs1030 14y ago
  I don't mind striking it rich with technology. But I think a part of me would hate to see my blood, sweat and tears poured down the drain by a large company intent on remaining where they are (not that Twitter did exactly this but you get my meaning).

bambax 14y ago

> We’d like to thank the millions of Posterous users who have supported us on our incredible journey. Yeah, right. How was that "incredible", BTW? I feel I've read that same story many many times. As a Posterous user, I'm so glad I used my own domain.

harryh 14y ago
Oh come on, have some empathy! They started their own business. They gave it a go! They had a decent degree of success. Just because they didn't make it work doesn't mean it's ok to be so dismissive.
- bambax 14y ago
  They are the ones lacking empathy! Did you read the OP? They left their users out to dry, and instead of telling them (us) that they are sorry and that maybe they understand our situation of being burned yet again, they sound like they're very happy with themselves, "building features to help [us] discover and share what’s happening in the world – on an even larger scale". I don't even know what that means. You may argue that the world doesn't end with Posterous shutting down, and you'd be right. But the tone of that post is not ok.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

danso 14y ago

This has only been mentioned once in the thread, but if Jekyll seems like too much work to setup, I highly, highly recommend Octopress: http://octopress.org/ http://octopress.org/ It's based off of Jekyll but handles a lot of the boilerplate, including rake tasks to deploy to Github pages. I've been following the github/octopress project for awhile and have seen a lot of activity in the past few weeks, so hopefully version 2.1 is just around the corner. edit: Also, as a Tumblr user (for my photoblog), I would not recommend using Tumblr for those who are into technical/indepth writing. The set of HTML you can use is limited...for example, I don't think tables are allowed. Its social network of sharing is also more suited toward visual blogs, not ones of deep content.

sbilik 14y ago
I like the idea of Octopress and Jekyll, but the few times I've tried them, it seems that they don't easily scale. My blog has over 2900 entries. Build from scratch. chug chug chug That I understand. Now add a new entry and try to get an incremental rebuild in less than 30 seconds. Has anyone tackled this in either project??
- glesica 14y ago
  I use a makefile. Only rebuilds the pages that have been added / modified (which, of course is the point of a makefile in general).
  - sbilik 14y ago
    I'm a bit unclear. Do you use a makefile instead of Jekyll/Octopress? Or somehow in combination with it? Yes, I do remember that years ago I read about a static web management system that was makefile-centric, but think it lost popularity as more advanced CMS's came out. Also I have trouble thinking about how a makefile can help you manage the 'Prev' and 'Next" attributes on a page. This is, not only make HTML from the page I just generated, but also go back to the previous writeup and update it to add a 'Next' link to it.
    - 14y ago

dave1619 14y ago

Can somebody please help me out? I'm confused here. I thought Posterous (before being acquired by Twitter) was doing quite well and was seen as the biggest competitor to Tumbler. It would seem that Posterous had a ton of users (would love to know details) and that they could monetize those users fairly simply through display ads. So, with a ton of users creating content and even more viewing that content, I would imagine it to be a pretty good business model. What confuses me is that rumor has it that Posterous was sold for $10m. I really don't understand that. That basically is treating all of posterous.com users/content as worthless, and just buying the team. And it appears that Twitter did think like that (considering that posterous.com is shutting down). But my question is how many users did posterous have? What was their traffic like? Were they doing well, or were they a sinking ship and thus they sold? Or did Twitter offer much more than $10m (maybe stock options worth 30-40m more?)? I'd like to know because I think it would be helpful for startups to understand this space (blogging, content creation) and what kind of business models work and what kind of traffic is needed to make a successful business. So, if there is anybody with inside knowledge on this stuff, please speak up. I'd also love to hear directly from the Posterous co-founders. Please share your experiences.

jff 14y ago
I don't think I have ever viewed any content on Posterous. I didn't even know what it does until I started reading these comments. On the other hand, I get sent Tumblr links daily. Multiple times a day. If Posterous is the biggest competitor to Tumblr, it seems that says Tumblr has no real competition.
jsnk 14y ago
You can't compare Posterous to Tumblr in terms of user base. Tumblr is in top 50 websites in the world. I doubt that Posterous even cracked top 500.
- dave1619 14y ago
  Sure, but if they were able to get into the top 500 shouldn't that be a business worth more than $10m? Especially since it's user created content, and if they do it right they could keep rising in the ranks of top sites. I'm curious if they were experiencing a growth stall or even negative growth before selling. Because if they were growing, I don't understand why they would sell and abandon their product unless the offer was ridiculously high.

dendory 14y ago

This is yet another reminder of how important it is to own your content, and why a blog is best hosted at a domain you control.

arketyp 14y ago
I distinctly remember reassuring myself when I created my blog one year ago that there is no way Twitter would leave out the option to download your data if they decided to kill off Posterous. It would just be way too bad PR.

nell 14y ago

Services that don't get traction shutdown. Services that get traction and become successful eventually shutdown anyway. I wonder whats the point of investing my time in a free service.

kintamanimatt 14y ago

This is probably one of those times when we can thank the Internet Archive for preserving the internet that's no longer with us, or, in this case, the part of the internet that's about to go dark.

przemoc 14y ago

When Posterous emerged I had high hopes for it. My first post was quite enthusiastic. http://przemoc.posterous.com/rouse-e-by-post-ie-why-i-am-here-at-posterous http://przemoc.posterous.com/rouse-e-by-post-ie-why-i-am-her... But I quickly understood that their service wasn't meant to improve at all. Every problem I reported to them was dismissed (directly or indirectly). So I created following page to warn the others. http://faulty.posterous.com/ http://faulty.posterous.com/ I thought about the idea of posting via (plain-text) mail seriously, but they weren't sharing my mindset. I left posterous long time ago (well, my CNAME still points there, have to fix it...) and I see it was a wise decision. Rule #0 of the internet: you have to constantly backup it!

johnnyn 14y ago
This isn't fair at all. Posterous was very responsive to user feedback and reported bugs. Posterous engineers spent much of their time answering support emails directly and finding solutions for users. As a matter of fact, support emails go directly to engineers inboxes. Perhaps the problem was that there just weren't enough engineers. Posterous may not have found a way to make money but the site was definitely meant to improve IMHO. Email, Groups, Spaces, slideshows, sharing to multiple social networks -- the list goes on.
- przemoc 14y ago
  It was all about some bells and whistles, if anything. Email - barely half-baked feature and my biggest problem with Posterous, as initially it was their most hyped core feature (and I believed them). Spaces it's just ol' plain Posterous, they enhanced the name for some vague reasons. Groups is nothing special. Slideshows - another lightbox variant. Sharing to multiple social networks - buggy. The list goes on? So bring it. Meanwhile, I'll bring my own. Posterous was moderately responsive at most, but e-mail responsiveness and fixing/improving the site and its functionality are different things. Even CEO may be responding to my mails, but it means nothing if it doesn't change a bit of the outcome. I guess the problem was that they had their own vision and roadmap paved with features that will have the biggest impact. They were simply unwilling to pay attention to anything else. It would be fine, really, if they stated it clearly from the beginning. 1. Initially Suyash responded to my first mail (appraisal; asking for markdown inline images, feedburner mybrand and introduction of commenting system such as intense debate). It looked like: "Thanks for your wonderful email and detailed feedback. I'll pass on some of your suggestions to the team." 2. Second thread (Identi.ca autopost and unwanted location disclosure) didn't get any response. 3. Third thread (wrong URL of the post being previously private and with the title changed before becoming publicized, i.e. premature public URL generation) "We'll look into changing this behavior in a future update." 4. Fourth thread ( doesn't work with markdown, editor doesn't switch to markdown mode immediately, even though the post was written in markdown, no setting for making markdown the default mail posting style) didn't get any response. 5. In my mail starting the fifth thread (1 month later) I collected existing problems. Response, this time from Rick: re commenting system - "Very few have asked for this, so it is unlikely that we will implement without a lot more support." re url prematurely created - "I'm not sure I understand your question." re edit in markdown mode immediately - "this is in our queue" re  equivalent in markdown - "I will check on status of this to make sure it is added the next time we update this feature" re automarkdown mail - "this is in our queue" re markdown inline images - "this is in our queue" My response got no response, so 3 weeks later I asked about any progress. "Unfortunately, no meaningful progress - these are on our list, but not yet high enough on the priority queue for us to work on yet." I ask again 2.5 months later. "Your requests are still on our feature list, but not many people have requested them so they are not prioritized very highly. We're a small team with a lot still to add and are trying to focus on the features that will have the biggest impact." Finally I was so frustrated that I suggested working myself on some of bugs/lacking features (free of charge, maybe t-shirt or something) as they are mostly easy to implement. I wrote also that it's sad that identi.ca problem was not solved. "Thanks so much for your offer to help - to clarify, we did look at the identica problem and it's on our list too. Unfortunately, we can't easily open up our code to outside developers right now." I mailed them no more, as you know, it was pointless. For some time there was a forum available, when people reported their problems, bugs, etc. It was all the same - "it's in our queue, but not high enough." --- Conclusions Be honest - if you don't want to fix reported problems and hear about even simple enhancements, as you won't implement them how trivial they are (because it doesn't fit into your vision or whatever, I don't know), just say it clearly in public (on the page) or at least private (in the first response, I wouldn't bother you anymore). The tragedy of the present times is mediocrity in everything, but software and web services in particular. Let's add some new flashy features no matter how buggy the rest is. Hopefully laymen will think that it supposed to be like that and technicians can be ignored - they are negligible minority.

Tawheed 14y ago

If I Was CEO of Posterous (written in 2010) http://www.tawheedkader.com/2010/06/if-i-was-ceo-of-posterous/ http://www.tawheedkader.com/2010/06/if-i-was-ceo-of-posterou...

marizmelo 14y ago

Not a surprise. I saw posterous as a better option for Tumblr, but after they create the "spaces" version I felt like lost. The original idea it was simple and worked, but after they got traction I think they lost the vision, and after twitter bought them they totally mess up. Well, good luck at twitter.

nonamegiven 14y ago

Regardless of where you physically host your blog, or email, or other service, use your own domain name. That way acquisitions don't matter for your readers and correspondence, just move and no one's the wiser.

aerolite 14y ago

Wow, I never saw that coming :(

desireco42 14y ago

Posterous might not have been as big as Tumblr, but it was big. It was obvious it's management had some lack of vision, since introducing Spaces and other confusing additions. Even with all this, it is completely confusing to me seeing it sold to Twitter and just shutting down service. I personally will not believe to use any service made by those guys, especially Posthaven looks ridiculous in light of how Posterous got miss-managed. Having said all this, I am not judging founders for selling out, I think they did a good thing and it is their absolutely their right, probably could've gotten way more from someone else, but it's their decision, as online user, I just can't touch anything they make.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

mdip 14y ago

Funny thing, I remember clicking links on HN years ago and seeing the Posterous tab in the upper right corner of my screen. But it's been a long time. It kinda brought me back to what was the not-so-distant-past. Just one suggestion: When discontinuing a product, eliminate the link in the upper right that says "Join SPACES". It's a little thing. And nobody expects anyone to design product "un"-launches the way they design product launches.

jwmoz 14y ago

Nooooooooo. My blog! http://blog.jmoz.co.uk http://blog.jmoz.co.uk Best replacement, wordpress? Need to 301 everything :/

xfax 14y ago

These sort of shenanigans make me wary of using any service that has raised a considerable amount of external funding. Believe it or not, VCs (as opposed to angels) are only in it to get a good return. This frequently forces companies to sell out at the detriment to their customers (given the lack of IPOs as a viable exit option). I get that the founders are in it to make money as well, but don't expect anyone to use your service knowing well that you could just choose to sell out tomorrow. I wonder if we studied funded start ups over the last 10 years, whether we'll see a pattern of selling out and then discontinuing service.

jonpeda 14y ago
angels don't want return?
- xfax 14y ago
  They do, but they are investing their own money and can choose to value whatever they please (e.g. Social responsibility). VC firms on the other hand have a fiduciary responsibility to their limited partners to maximize returns.

weddingcakes 14y ago

Shame, lots of good posts on Posterous blogs.

kstrauser 14y ago

I went the static site route (shout out to Blogofile (http://www.blogofile.com http://www.blogofile.com) because I didn't trust anyone but me to run my server and I got tired of running Wordpress and Drupal myself. I paid NearlyFreeSpeech.NET $20 a year ago to host the static files and have about half that still credited to my account. OK, it's not for everyone. Initial setup certainly wasn't for the faint of heart. But it was fun and replacing my host is as easy as finding another cheap host for text files and jpegs. It was worth it to me.

minhajuddin 14y ago

Simple solution for developers who are bloggers https://substancehq.com/ https://substancehq.com/

pootch 14y ago

What a garbage site. So glad they are gone. I guess now they get to sell all the personal information they collected without permission at bargain rates.

jakozaur 14y ago

Nooooo! Why so many simple useful products, that I would be happy to pay for are simple closed after aquihires. I know that this may be good for founders, but it let me against trying new companies which doesn't have a clear monetization strategy.

fiendsan 14y ago

true dat, it was just a matter of time! but i think its their loss, you create a brand and service that was really liked, i think selling it out to someone else to develop would be the most beneficial!

erdogan 14y ago

Any wisdom on how to import posterous content into tumblr? Posterous's auto post is not working for me anymore.