Goodbye Posterous

The end is nigh. I was very sorry to hear the news that the blogging platform Posterous is closing down for good on April 30th.  It is by far the easiest and most versatile blogging platform I have used, and the ability to upload a post directly via Smartphone was an added bonus.

Why has Twitter bought Posterous?  What is Posterous going to do now?  Why don't such sites last longer than a few years, just when people begin to get used to a new thing, then whoosh - it disappears leaving millions of users feeling a bit abandoned and frustrated. I will miss blogging with Posterous very much indeed!

The moral of the story is "Don't put all your eggs in one basket".  Having 6 blogs on Posterous was a bit like doing this, so now I am paying the slightly incovenient price.

Read this post from Lifehacker blog about how to transfer your Posterous blogs to other blogging platforms NOW.

You can also find out how on Free Technology for Teachers blog.

I have duly backed up and then downloaded all the files from Posteorus onto my computer and have transfered my blogs to 4 different blogging platforms:

Wordpress.com
Wordpress.org, 
Weebly.com
Blogger

Here is my brand new Weebly blog called Janet's Comics & Cartoons:

Weebly blog

Below you can see an archive blog of teaching materials and resources from past Lake School of English Teacher Refresher courses, which I have combined into one blog and transfered to wordpress.com. I will not be adding to it, as it will be simply archived posts for me and teachers I taught to refer to.  The name of the blog is Janet's Teaching Resource Blog

Wordpress.com blog

The biggest headache so far has been my Project366 blog which was 2 gigabytes - full of images.  There is a size limit of what you can transfer from Posterous to other sites, and my Project366 is way over the limit!

I decided to use Blogger for my Project366 blogging platform, as I feel comfortable with using the site and it has a lot of features I like. I was able to autopost approximately 30 of my 366 posts, and then suddenly it didn't allow me to autopost anymore.  I am now manually autoposting about 20 posts a day from Posterous to Blogger, and it is a bit tedious, I have to admit. I will get there eventually.  Project 366 means a lot to me so it is worth doing this in order to retain the blog in its entirety.

My transfer of Fluffy's blog to wordpress.org went very smoothly. I just needed  to upload the wordpress xtml file, which Posterous kindly supplied, and then it uploaded all my posts to the new site.  The quality of the images was not the same however, so my husband kindly helped me in that area.

A New Era
Having blogs on 4 different platforms might prove to be a bit much, I will have to see how I get on. Watch this space!

My final word is I'd like to say how much I really enjoyed using Posterous over the past couple of years, and I am very sad to see it disappear into thin air, literally...

Goodbye Posterous.  Thanks for the good times....