Starting a blog with Posterous

Introduction

Blogging is an increasingly popular Internet activity; in fact, estimates from 2006 stated that some 175,000 new blogs were created every day, one every half second. There is a correspondingly wide range of sophistication and features among the major blogging platforms out there; Some features come at a cost, either financially or in terms of complexity. As such, a new writer looking to start a new blog faces a tough choice as to what her blogging platform should be. Ideally, your choice of platform shouldn’t affect writing, but that’s often not the case. In fact, the complexity and difficulty of maintaining the new creation is one of the main reasons why the vast majority of blogs soon become inactive after their initial creation. If it is difficult to add a new post or edit an existing one, the blogger usually loses interest very soon.

In recent times, blogging platforms have sought to simplify the entire process and strive to integrate with other online services like Facebook or Twitter to help promote blog posts in the social media arena. The most successful platforms are those that achieve such integration in the best possible way. If a platform allows the announcement of new posts, the inclusion of comments and useful “widgets” on the site so that visitors can easily refer their friends to your writing, this can be a very powerful tool.

The Posterous platform is a blogging system that manages to do this integration very well; their support for social networks is constantly growing. However, despite its extraordinary power, it uses one of the most familiar environments for users to create and edit posts; take advantage of its existing familiarity and ubiquity of email. By automatically handling posts and converting attachments, it offers a feature-rich experience; amazingly, you can do this without even requiring to sign 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 publish your first blog post to [email protected] by typing the title of your post in the subject line and the text in the body of the email. If you include rich text effects like italics in your email, they will follow directly into your post. This way, your familiar email client becomes your blog post “dashboard”; there’s no need to learn a new editor, and all modern email clients offer support for the HTML effects you’d like to use to spice up your posts. There is no separate account creation step; if you’ve never published before, Posterous will create your site with the appropriate defaults; otherwise your latest blog post will be published immediately. Smartphones are already supported; if you can send an email, then you can post to your blog.

Customizing Your Posterous Site

The first Posterous response you receive when you submit a new blog post from a new email address will reply with a link to a page that will allow you to set up your site, including assigning a theme, URL, and title. Posterous also gives you a statistics page that shows, at a glance, how many hits your page has, and gives you options to subscribe to other Posterous blogs via email (although it supports regular RSS, of course). A friendly element on the Posterous member page is that it lists, with a progress bar, precisely the steps you’d like to take to customize your blog and take full advantage of the features Posterous has to offer. This is a smooth way of presenting the things Posterous is capable of; Behind its “publish by email” simplicity lies a powerful and feature-rich platform.

Promotion and Integration

One of the most powerful features of the Posterous platform is that you can announce new posts and comments on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, thereby promoting your work with minimal effort. Even more than that, by a mechanism known as self publishing, Posterous blog posts can also be published immediately on other blogging platforms, including Blogger and WordPress. Once the integration is set up and properly configured, Posterous will announce your new posts on your social networks, and you can even be prompted to post comments as tweets or Facebook updates. Posterous also knows exactly what to do with email attachments. If multiple images are attached to your post, they will be presented in the blog post as a scrollable photo album. Attachments in document formats such as PDF are displayed using Scribd’s ePaper, allowing them to be viewed and read in most modern browsers, without the need to download.

Summary

Posterous is an imaginative combination of many Internet technologies to offer one of the simplest and most user-friendly blogging platforms out there, but its simplicity belies its power. Whether you’re a beginner or an expert, or looking for a primary blogging platform or backup for a second blog, Posterous is worth checking out.