Playing with Posterous

So, as you’ve probably figured out, I’ve opened a Posterous account. As the title of the site indicates, I’m using it as a junk drawer section for hellomelissa.net, my main site. You can access it from this site by clicking on the Junk Drawer link at the top of this page.

“Junk drawer” to me means: items I want to save for myself (like all those recipes I posted last night), pictures that I want to post but not necessarily post on my Flickr page (I’d like to keep all the pictures I’ve been posting on various twitter picture hosting sites in one place that is searchable.), and thoughts/links that are too long for Twitter but too short (or inappropriate) for this site.

What I like so far about Posterous:


it really is as easy
as they say it is.

The bookmarklet
– I posted all those recipes last night by going through my Read It Later list (where the links to those recipes were originally stored) and highlighting the recipe. Then I just clicked the bookmarklet and it picked up the formatted text and included the attribution link. I did some cleanup in a couple of spots to get rid of “Send to a friend” type links, but on the whole it was really smooth. I only had issues with autoposting (which I’ll go into detail on below).

What I don’t like so far about Posterous:

I really wish I could put this functionality on my own (WordPress) site. Not sure if a self-hosted Posterous would work like a self-hosted WordPress site, but I like having control. I like knowing exactly where my files are and being able to access them via FTP. Given that this is for my junk drawer stuff, this doesn’t bother me as much as if it was for my entire site. This is my issue though – many people prefer that Posterous does all the heavy lifting. I may also prefer it too someday, but I love my plugins!

I want Autopost to be SometimesPost
. I added all my services so I could have the little icons under my profile. Then people can visit those places easily. I don’t want to autopost to those sites all of the time. I changed my autopost settings to say no one can autopost at all. My icons are still there, which is what I want. The problem with this is then I can’t click on a post after it’s been posted and autopost it because my services aren’t configured to autopost.

Then there’s the bookmarklet. Before I turned my autoposting off, I made a few posts last night with the bookmarklet but forgot to turn off the autoposting. Those posts then went to my various services in ways I didn’t want them to. Then I ran around (figuratively) deleting all the crossposts. The turn off autopost box is on the second page of the bookmarklet so it’s easy to forget to uncheck it.

To sum up I want to autopost some of the time, but I want to also be able to do it after a post has already made it to Posterous. I think I need to work on fine-tuning my Autopost options but any insight you have is totally welcome.

On the whole

I think Posterous will be lots of fun to play with. Any tips and tricks you have are totally welcome. For now, I’m going to look for Greasemonkey scripts to see if I can do some tweaking.

Update: See my update post (which was updated itself) to see how I figured out how I plan to work with these sites. It took some fiddling, but I think I can establish a good workflow now.

2 thoughts on “Playing with Posterous”

  1. I am so happy you wrote about Posterous! I opened my account a few weeks ago and I have yet to pin anything. I get on the site, start perusing boards, and then I feel like my head is going to explode from all the creative juices that are flowing.

    Hearing you describe it as simple is inspiring. I also LOVE your Junk Drawer. I might have to do something like that over on my blog. If you don’t mind of course. 🙂

    Reply
    • Please do Morgan. I’ve seen a few posterous/tumblr blogs (and other mini-blogs) referred to as the junk drawer, so it’s certainly not an original concept. 🙂 I figure it’s a place to put things I want to share, but not necessarily make a big post about on my main site (and are too long/complicated for Twitter).

      I’m not using it as much as I’d like, but I like having it. One thing I didn’t like was that when I autoposted a picture from my Flickr account, it gave me a linkback, but ended up copying the picture to Posterous’ server as well. I understand why it works like that – just not sure I like it. 😛

      Reply

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Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Canada
This work by Melissa Price-Mitchell is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Canada.
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