aaron hughling online

As you may have noticed I recently made the switch over to Posterous from Wordpress.

Without having read to many other peoples insights on this, I'll speak to my own experience so far.

Why move? Clearly WordPress is the dominate blogging platform. Well, some would say Posterous isn't blogging, it's something different. I'll let the big brains work that one out.

1. I love the look and feel. I love simplicity. I got my start in web as a web designer and I guess I still hold onto that. Simple equals easy.
   
2. With Wordpress, despite their claim to be the easiest solution for blogging, I found it not so easy. Sure, if you just want to throw up text, okay, perhaps, but not for what I was looking to do. I never found a free theme that either gave me the functionality that I wanted or had a design that I liked. So, I ended up buying the Thesis theme. And although that helped considerably, you ultimately need to be a programmer to get all the kinks worked out and have everything exactly how you want it. Along those lines there's all those upgrades that may or may not work and all the plugins you have to keep up with. Just too much for me.
3. Also, and I thought this was pretty cool, Posterous allows you to create subscriptions from other Posterous users. So, in a sense, it's developing it's own community.
   
4. And lastly, I'm still in experimenting mode here. I need to test the waters on these different platforms to help in my professional knowledge and decisions I make at work. That means I've got play with most everything that shows signs of being adopted, and Posterous shows those signs as you can see from the images I attached.

Now, for the experience I've had so far with Posterous.

1. Well, they have an import function that will grab your current blog and import it into their site. Easy as pie, right? Could be, if it worked. I went through it and it didn't work. I emailed their support and ended up taking half-a-week for it to finally import. Not cool.
2. I also went through the process of changing the ISP of my domain to, of course, reflect the new Posterous blog. Now that piece went very smoothly.
3. Google Analytics, set that up, and is working well on the new blog.
4. All you do to post a new article is email it in. Super simple, super easy.
5. I've even now set up an additional blog for my family. I set about 4 different people up with the ability to post to the blog. Guess what, they're all very non-technically savy people, and they all get it and are loving it. Pretty cool.
6. There is some additional functionality with Posterous that is lacking. But it hasn't been too much so far to really turn me off, and every time I emailed their helpdesk about it they said they were already looking at adding it.

I only expect the Posterous experience to get even better. And, I predict, that Posterous will continue gaining popularity.

What are your experiences?

Over the past few days I have begun to transition my blog from Wordpress to Posterous. The migration should pretty much be complete at this point.

And hopefully I have kept my RSS subscription and everything in tact. Through this process I've already experienced some ups and downs.

I'll blog a more detailed post soon to cover the transition in case anyone else is considering the same move.