Some Answers

I’ve had a couple of people ask me why I’m switching from WordPress.com to Posterous.com as my blogging host/software/state-of-mind, and I’d like to explain it here.

I wasn’t updating my old blog.  Like, at all.  I don’t know why, exactly.  It was a combination of WordPress being slow and/or clunky, my time being taken up with Tumblr (I love that blogging platform), and my own hangups with WordPress being so extensible and just large.

Posterous is smaller and has a different way of approaching the whole blogging thing.  I feel like I can post quicker things, as well as longer things here.  The editor takes up the whole screen, so I’m not distracted by shiny “change this and change that” sidebars.  There are no “plugins” and things I can add, so the content is top dog on my page.  I can “push” to other services (including wordpress, though I won’t be pushing there) easily, without having to set up a twitterfeed for them.

The editor is faster and easier for me to work with.  I haven’t tried the uploader, but it looks as though it’s easier to deal with than WordPress’.

The editor.  See how simple it is.

WordPress is great for a site where you need a lot of extensibility, plugins, and sidebar widgets.  Posterous doesn’t have all that, and I’m fine with it.  I have links to everything over in the sidebar, and since Posterous has added “pages” it’s really made wordpress “too large” for me.  One of the reasons I was keeping my wordpress active was because of it’s extensibility, but now that Posterous has matched (and exceeded, in some cases; like the bookmarklet) WordPress, I don’t really see why I need a behomoth of a blog host.

I’m still collecting some comments over there on my Unity post, but I’m hoping people will come to this blog and start commenting.  I’m making a clean break, and I’ve informed everyone about the change, through Twitter, Facebook, status.net, and my blog itself.  I’ve decided that I’m not going to mirror anything.

I guess I’m looking for something that’s easier for me to manage (though WordPress is still pretty easy) and something that allows me to post via email.  I don’t do much email posting, but I might give it another go using Posterous.

Also, I think that I felt like I needed to have something profound to write in the WordPress blog.  Or something.  There was some sort of mental barrier to me sitting down and writing and making a posts.  I miss writing.  I miss creating content.  I miss creating technical stuff.

I’ve got some good ides for this incarnation of my blog; namely podcast reviews (one a week til I work through all the ones I watch and listen to), Ubuntu/Xubuntu reviews, and more software reviews.  I might also throw in a book review and album review or three.  And of course, my thoughts on Ubuntu, Linux, OpenSource and Free Software.

Relax and enjoy.  Pull up a chair and drink a cup of coffee.  Oh, and update your RSS feed readers too.  :)

So…

This is what Posterous is like.

I quite like the way this works.

I’ve moved here from wordpress.  I hope it gets me blogging more.

The only thing I see that’s a problem is that my formatting is off on the imported posts, but oh well.  I don’t feel like going through and dealing with all of the formatting issues.  For the most part things are readable.

Moving

I’ve decided to move to Posterous for my main blog.

The URL is http://gamerchick02.posterous.com

Posterous was able to pull in all my comments, so that’s pretty cool.  I’ll leave this as a archive.

Tumblr vs. Posterous vs. Amplify

Another pitting of the blogging services.

I’m an avid Tumblr user. I love the service, since it’s relatively easy to post stuff to (links, videos, pictures, etc). I like that I can reblog cool content from Life, Newsweek, my friends, and other stuff that I find in my tracked tags. Oh, and I have tracked tags that I follow on Tumblr. Very awesome. I don’t see a way to follow tracked tags on either Posterous or Amplify.

Also, there’s an easy to find “Delete your account” link at the bottom of the Settings page. THIS is very important to me (yeah, I like to sign up for different stuff and try it out, so sue me).

Posterous currently seems to have no way to delete your account. This irks me, since it’s an overlap with Tumblr, and I’m now using Tumblr (better community and ease of use, IMHO). Oh, you can delete your blog, but you have to create another blog, make it your “main” blog, and then delete your other blog. *boggle* Why not have a “delete account” right in your settings? How hard is that?

Same with Amplify. I checked this out and was thinking about using it, but it’s essentially another Posterous with more commenting options and the ability to “clip” the web. Ok, that’s fine; you didn’t offer any ideas as to what your website did before I signed up, and now I can’t find a “delete account” button anywhere.

I guess my point is that a website should make it easy to sign up for a service, and it also should make it easy to delete your account if/when you decide the site doesn’t meet your needs anymore (or you wanted to test it, and it doesn’t work for what you do).

Websites should also make it easy to figure out what the service is before you sign up. Last.fm is easy to figure out, twitter is easy to figure out. Blogger, wordpress, identi.ca, etc are all easy to figure out. Amplify? Not so much. Posterous? Yes, but it’s very light on the community aspect of things.

There are some questions on Yahoo Answers and other question sites related to this. I hope the creators of these sites re-think the way they set up the sites and add a “delete account” link somewhere. It’s not acceptable to have to email someone to delete your account.

Just my little rant for a Friday evening.