The Daily Haggis is a weblog written by Sean Loyless. It covers entertainment and tech-related topics, as well as original entries and stories.
Version XIII  |  Since 12.18.2002

Posterous: A New Way of Getting Use Out of Your Ailing Blog

I stumbled onto the new social blogging platform Posterous last night after seeing several posts on sites like FriendFeed and Facebook from friends and other users. At first glance I dismissed the site as just another Tumblr or mini-blogging platform, but upon signing up I discovered it was much, much more than that.

If you haven’t noticed already, in the past 24 hours I have posted more articles on The Daily Haggis than I have in the past 6 months. This is largely due to the innovative and brilliant tools provided by the site. Posterous makes it easy to update all your favorite sites, from Facebook status updates and posts, sending directly to FriendFeed, uploading videos via YouTube, photos via Flickr and Picasa, and of course uploading to your WordPress, Blogger, or other blogging platform.

Two of the most useful tools in Posterous' arsenal are the sharing bookmarklet and the ability to post via email. The sharing bookmarklet, which looks similar to what FriendFeed, Tumblr, and Facebook offer, is one of the quickest and easiest ways to share photos, videos, and text. It only allows you to attach one photo to a post so multiple image posts won't be possible, but on sites with articles it will grab the entire article as an excerpt and put it directly below the image in a blockquote format.

The second, and probably most powerful, is the email to Posterous feature. By sending an email to the site and attaching files, Posterous will create your entry for you. Attach video or audio and it embeds it in its own player. Use your email programs bold, italic, and add url features and it will translate the entire thing to HTML for you.

I spent about 2 hours last night cleaning up my blog, killing any RSS validation errors (some were caused by plugins like Disqus and WP-SUP, and my MediaRSS stopped working as well), and streamlining my sharing to other sites so that a majority of new single picture or video content will be published to The Daily Haggis first and then pushed out to other sites. This is designed to not only get a good use out of my stale and floundering blog, but also to promote readership and get conversation back on my site.

I wrote this entire blog post in my gMail using the sites native bolding, italicizing, and URL linking features. I’ve also attached a cover of Joy Division’s "Love WIll Tear Us Apart" by Broken Social Scene so you can see the MP3 player in action. Enjoy the new content, faithful readers!

Love Will Tear Us Apart by Broken Social Scene   (11669 KB)
Listen on posterous

Related Entries

posted on August 16th, 2009 @ 11:52 am by Sean Loyless (Haggis) | This article has been viewed 1,482 times.
Posterous: A New Way of Getting Use Out of Your Ailing Blog

Comments on Posterous: A New Way of Getting Use Out of Your Ailing Blog

Subscribe to the Daily Haggis RSS Feed