Welcome to the land of dead hiccups and extinguished lightbulbs.
I’d managed to avoided blogging for ages, and the reason I started is a little strange. The guys at EchoLibre added my defunct Twitter account to the company blog, and I thought I may as well be a good sport and start using it again. I had seen Posterous a few months previously, and remembered that the biggest selling point was email integration. So I created an account, and started blogging so as to have something to Tweet about. I’d always railed against the idea, but the process was so smooth, I didn’t notice until it was too late!
Like the girlfriend who turns out to be crazy, the things that first attracted me to Posterous are the very things that ended up driving me nuts. The whole email thing seemed great at first, until I realised that email doesn’t translate very well to the Web. The first problem was the introduction of two points of failure. Rich text editors tend to produce crufty HTML, but even when I corrected for the problems in my email client, I had to further correct for a new set of problems introduced by the Posterous HTML post-processing.
This became so much of a burden for me that I started using the Web interface instead, and gave up on email. Which was fine, until I realised that they don’t provide any way to attach files to a post via the Web. If I wanted to include an image, or some music, I had to send an email to a private Posterous blog, edit for the problems, and then repost to my main one. If I wanted to add a new file, I had to delete my post and start from scratch via email. Needless to say, this was quite a ridiculous state of affairs.
So, I set about finding a replacement service that was free, hosted, and dead simple. I hate editing text in a browser, so bonus points for integrating with a desktop blogging client. Tumblr seems to hit this sweet spot pretty nicely, so I’ve decided to switch. Moreover, I’m editing this post in MarsEdit, which seems pretty nice so far, and works with my regular text editor. And because I’m using FeedBurner and a subdomain of my personal site, I will be able to switch again without any disruption, which is comforting.
