How I Use Posterous

After kicking the idea around for a while, I finally decided to sign up and give Posterous a try. For those of you who are not familiar with Posterous, it’s a simple blogging platform that allows you to post anything to the Web using e-mail. Simply send an e-mail to post@posterous.com including content such as text, documents, photos, videos, music, or audio and Posterous will take care of the rest.

The reason I decided to use Posterous is because it bridges the gap between Twitter and my WordPress blog. There’s a lot going in the space between Twitter and a full length blog so I felt it was necessary to have space where I can post content that exceeds the 140 character limit and falls short of my formal WordPress content.

Let’s say I want to share content with my friends on Twitter, but I can’t squeeze my thoughts into 140 characters or less. No problem, Posterous will be there to pick up the slack. The service offers a feature called “autopost” which allows you to send content to Posterous once and then will distribute the content to all the social media sites that you have linked to your account. If you would like to send content to a specific social media site, e.g. Twitter, you can do that too. Simply type your message in an e-mail, send it to Posterous using the e-mail address twitter@posterous.com, and let Posterous take care of the rest.

So, after sending an e-mail to twitter@posterous.com, the content is posted to my blog and a tweet, accompanied by a link pointing to my blog, is sent to Twitter so friends can read the entire message. Now, let’s say I want to send content to Flickr and Twitter, but exclude the other social media sites I have linked to my Posterous account. Sending an e-mail to flickr+twitter@posterous.com would do the tick. Nice, right?

Posterous will also serve as that space where I post dribs and drabs of content that doesn’t quite fit in with my WordPress blog content. Some examples of informal content that will be posted to my Posterous blog include random ramblings, a paragraph or two of content, random photos or videos taken with my mobile phone, or perhaps a voice note. Although I use TwitPic for my Twitter photos and Qik for my mobile videos, Posterous can be used as a “catchall” space if necessary. So when I’m on the move, traveling, relaxing at the pool, or whatever it is I’m doing, Posterous will be available to capture anything and house all my content in one single space.

Overall, Posterous is a great blogging platform for people who are looking for a free, simple, and quick way to blog with some nice features. Posterous can handle just about anything you throw at it and allows you to post updates to all your social media sites with very little effort. Posterous also gives you the option to add Google Analytics and FeedBurner to your blog so you can gather information about who is visiting and who is subscribing. If you are interested in changing the look and feel of Posterous, you can choose from the different built-in themes or customize your own theme using CSS and HTML. Lastly, Posterous even allows you to use a custom domain instead of the default http://yourname.posterous.com.

Unfortunately, even with all the nice features outlined above, Posterous does not compare to a self-hosted WordPress blog, in my opinion. You see, the ability to control content is one of the most important things for me as a blogger and because Posterous doesn’t allow me to perform simple things such as creating pages and subpages, editing permalinks, adding plug-ins, widgets, or choose a comment system, it could never work as my primary blogging platform. WordPress, on the other hand, meets all my formal publishing needs and the fact that I own, host, and manage all the content makes blogging that much more enjoyable.

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