Posterous makes blogging easy

One of the WordPress plugins I’ve always been on the lookout for, but so far haven’t found, is one that will enable me to post to this blog via email. As I’ve said before, I spend an enormous amount of time on the train during the week; time that could be spent productively and yet all too frequently isn’t due to lack of wireless broadband on my laptop.

I do, however, have a mobile with internet access and have begun to use it extensively. However there is only so much you can do on a tiny screen and keypad, so there are distict constraints to it as well.

This is particularly apparent when it comes to composing blog posts. I’ve been fortunate to find plugins that format my blog in a much more mobile-friendly layout – thereby benefitting anyone who might be reading it – however the UI doesn’t really extend to the dashboard area as well.

So writing blog posts while en route to and from work either requires manuvering through a tiny text box, or temporarily using a text file on my laptop until I’m in range of a wireless signal, then cutting and pasting the content into the dashboard area.

This is still a world beyond where technology was 10 or 15 years ago certainly, however I’ve still been looking for something more convenient.

Posterous

Having spent a little while experimenting this afternoon, I suspect that Posterous (http://posterous.com) may be just the thing. It is designed to make posting content to the web fast and easy and comes fairly highly regarded by several of my colleagues.

I’ve actually known about the service for quite some time now but never saw a use for it until I realised it could fill the gaps in functionality that I’d been trying to resolve for ages.

Syndicate Your Content

After setting up an account – which is literally as easy as sending an email – you have the ability to add a variety of services to the autopost area. Services include Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, blogs and several others.

Once set-up for autoposting is complete you can post to specific services (blog only, Twitter only), combinations (blog + Twitter), or all of the above using custom email addresses.

In the case of this post for example, I’ve composed it in the email area of my phone and then sent it to blog@posterous.com. Upon receiving the email, Posterous recognises me through my email address, determines which Posterous blog the content is directed to based on the pre-configured settings on the site, and then distributes the content accordingly.

Posterous for Content Backup

A distict advantage of posting content this way is it immediately replicates it in three different places – on Posterous, in your email sent folder, and in the ultimate destination. Having just experienced a near catastrophic collapse of my blog’s database this morning at the hands of my own stupidity, the implications of this aspect are all too clear: it pays to back-up.

Other Advantages

The other advantage of using Posterous in this way is that it centralises your activities a bit more, especially when you share links, videos and images via Twitter.

There are a number of services that let you easily post content to Twitter, and provide a tiny URL to include in the Tweet, but what you end up with is content all over the place. This is particularly true given the fact some clients do not give you choice in which hosting option you use.

Using Posterous would enable you to keep track of things much more easily – and send them to multiple locatons to boot.

Outstanding Questions

That said there are one or two questions I want to sort out – namely, if you can designate either tags or categories to assign to blog posts syndicated via Posterous?

At least from the results of my first test, it would appear that posts are passed through as Uncategorized when they appear on their destination. This effectively requires an extra step to finalise the process, since you’ll need to go to your blog to finalise the grouping of the content according to your existing convention.

If you could include this infromation in the email it would be that much more convenient.

Nonetheless, Posterous is definitely worth a look. It’s a pretty good primary blog platform too.

Posted via email from Mike Bogle