by Chris Nash
Introduction
Blogging is an increasingly-popular Internet activity; indeed, estimates in 2006 claimed that something of the order of 175,000 new blogs were created every day – one every half a second. There is a correspondingly wide range of sophistication and features between the major blogging platforms out there; some features come at a cost, either financial or in terms of complexity. As such, a new writer wishing to begin a new blog is faced with a difficult choice as to what their blogging platform should be. Ideally, the choice of platform should not impact the writing, but that is not often the case. Indeed, the complexity and difficulty to maintain the new creation is one of the main reasons why the vast majority of blogs out there soon become inactive after they are initially created. If it is difficult to add a new post or edit an existing one, typically the blogger loses interest very early.
In recent times, blogging platforms have looked to simplify the whole process, and strive to integrate with other online services such as Facebook or Twitter to help in the promotion of blog posts in the social networking realm. The most successful platforms are those which achieve such integration as seamlessly as possible. If a platform allows announcement of new posts, inclusion of comments, and handy “widgets” on the site to allow visitors to easily refer their friends to your writing, this can be a very powerful tool indeed.
The Posterous platform is one blogging system that manages to perform this integration very well; its support for social networking is constantly growing. However, despite its extraordinary power, it uses one of the most familiar environments for users to create and edit posts; it leverages their existing familiarity and the ubiquitousness of email. By automatically handling posts and converting file attachments, it delivers a very feature-rich experience; extraordinarily, it can do this without even requiring signing up for the service. This article explains how.
Getting Started with Posterous
All it takes to start a blog with Posterous is a single email. Simply post your first blog post to post@posterous.com writing the title of your post in the subject line and the text in the email body. If you include rich text effects like italics in your email, those will follow through directly into your post. In this way, your familiar email client becomes your blog posting “dashboard”; there is no need to learn a new editor, and all modern email clients offer support for the HTML effects you would like to use to spice up your posts. There is no separate account creation step; if you have never posted before, Posterous will create your site with suitable defaults; otherwise, your latest blog post will be published immediately. Smart phones are already supported; if you can send email, then you can post to your blog.
Personalizing your Posterous Site
The first response from Posterous you get on sending a new blog post from a new email address will reply with a link to a page which will let you set up your site, including assigning a theme, URL, and title. Posterous also offers you a statistics page which shows, at a glance, the number of views your page has, and offers you options to subscribe to other Posterous blogs via email (although of course regular RSS is of course supported). One friendly item on the Posterous member page is it lists, with a progress bar, precisely the steps you might like to perform to customize your blog and make the most of the features Posterous offers. This is a gentle way to introduce the things Posterous is capable of; behind its “post by email” simplicity is a feature-rich, powerful platform.
Promotion and Integration
One of the most powerful features of the Posterous platform is it can announce new posts and comments on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, thus promoting your work with the minimum of effort. Even more than that, by a mechanism known as autoposting, posts to the Posterous blog can also be immediately published on other blog platforms as well, including Blogger and WordPress. Once integration is set up and with suitable settings, Posterous will announce your new posts on your social media feeds, and can even be instructed to post comments as tweets or Facebook updates. Posterous also knows precisely what to do with email attachments. If several images are attached to your post, they will be presented in the blog post as a scrollable photo album. Files attached in document formats such as PDF are shown using Scribd e-paper, which allows them to be viewed and read in most modern browsers, without a download.
Summary
Posterous is an imaginative combination of many Internet technologies to deliver one of the simplest, friendliest blogging platforms out there, but its simplicity belies its power. Whether you are a beginner or an expert, or whether you are looking for a primary blogging platform or a backup for a second blog, Posterous is worth a look.
Chris Nash is a mathematics graduate and a software engineer from the United Kingdom, currently residing in the Central Coast area of California. He strives to combine his expertise in technology and the Internet with his passion for writing. In his latest venture, http://reinventingme.posterous.com, Chris details how major life changes have presented him with an opportunity to start all over again with many aspects of his daily life, including his writing and blogging. Chris may be found on Twitter as @darlingman1970.
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