Seriously Impressed With Posterous

A couple of weeks ago I started taking another look at Posterous “ the clever web publishing platform that can auto-post out to dispirate destinations. A single email can become your blog post, a Twitter update, an image upload to Flickr or Picasa, a cross-post to Tumblr, a Facebook wall update, or more. The problem that always existed in Posterous previously was interpretation of email content (pretty important, given that you typically post to a posterous blog via email). You could probably describe it as “spotty” at best “ which is perhaps no fault of Posterous, because I’ve seen the HTML that Google Mail churns out, and it isn’t pretty. That story changed a little while ago because Posterous began supporting “markdown” “ a great shorthand textual method of hinting semantic tags. If you’ve ever played with 37signals Writeboards, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. So “ the discovery of Markdown at Posterous caused me to do a re-evaluation of sorts. While ruminating over yet another change to my blogging platform, it occurred to me that I could use auto-post to cross-populate places I have blogged in the recent past, and continue to keep those that matter updated. Good enough reason to import the archives then And that’s where it all went wrong. It turns out that trying to import 7 years worth of blog posts (over three thousand of them) caused the Posterous importer to fall over in a variety of inventive and spectacular ways. Having worked on all manner of migration projects myself over the years, I can completely understand why they might not have envisioned somebody turning up with the equivalent of the Encylopedia Galactica to store in their filofax. This is where it got good. After writing an email to the help team at Posterous, within an hour I had a reply “ from the CEO. Over the following days the communication continued, and it became obvious that all manner of work was going on at their end. Finally last night a quiet email arrived in the dead of night (on a Sunday!), informing me that the importer was now dealing with the 7 year payload, and would I like to go check it out. Halelujah! I don’t have enough good things to say about the team at Posterous. I am one blogger among tens of thousands, and yet they went the extra mile for me. It sounds like some code got re-written along the way too. In many ways, their effort and persistence recalls a post I made some time ago about the difference between west coast and east coast internet startups in the US. While Tumblr continues to send out stock responses to helpdesk questions, Posterous went out of their way to help one person and this post is the result.