Goodbye Tumblr, Hello Posterous
I've switched maha::software's blog from tumblr to posterous. All my blog content was transferred, except for comments because posterous does not support transferring comments from Disqus (probably my only gripe with the service). Sorry to my commenters... if you want, feel free to comment again :)
The major reason I made the switch was autoposting is done much better in posterous. By autoposting, I mean that when I post a new blog, I want to notify my Facebook friends, my twitter followers, etc. I don't want to have to do this manually, because I am lazy. This makes me wonder: how many decisions have I made out of laziness? Autopost with tumblr:- Twitter posts contain the title, followed by a truncated description. No way to customize this! Also, doesn't use an URL shortening service.
- Facebook posts: if you have multiple tumblr blogs, you can only post to Facebook from one blog at a time. Lame. Plus, changing the setting for this didn't work for me. So I couldn't get autopost to Facebook from Tumblr to work for me at all.
Autopost with posterous:
- Twitter posts are totally customizable and templated. Nice. They use post.ly to shorten URLs.
- Facebook: it works. Links to your post in the message and the notification line. There's no title in the body, but it is sent as the comment.
- Can't autopost to different accounts when posting to different posterous blogs. So, for example, you currently can't posts to one blog be tweeted with your personal account, and posts to another blog be tweeted with your business account. In an email exchange with posterous co-founder Sachin Agarwal, he confirmed this behavior and indicated that the functionality is coming soon. I appreciated the responsive customer service.
Couple of other notes: setting up Google Analytics with tumblr is a pain because their suggested method messes up the message when you share a post on Facebook. I hacked the tumblr theme to make this work, but it's easy with posterous and doesn't mess anything else up.
tumblr has the advantage in commenting because I have the flexibility to use Disqus. As far as I know, that's not currently doable with posterous.
posterous is innovating faster than tumblr and has done a lot of the details right. For a blogging service, I want all the little things to just work. I have other things to hack around with.
