Moving to Posterous

After months of deliberation, and concern about breaking permalinks, I've finally decided to make the move from a self-hosted Wordpress blog to posterous.com. There are arguments for and against, but my decision came down to the following.

Delegation

Using posterous means I no longer have to worry about updating software, managing databases and plugins, or backing up my content.

Email Interface

The feature that first attracted me to posterous is being able to easily post through email. Email is one of the fastest and most universally available interfaces to any software, and the more I can work in gmail without having to resort to some horrible javascript text editor, the better.

Less Resistance

Posterous' simplicity forces you to worry more about posting content and less about the environment. Unlike Wordpress, the whole posterous experience feels light and quick - there is little resistance to post.

Simplifying Conversation

For years I'd seen comments as a great way to facilitate conversation from my posts, and Posterous' lack of ability to import Disqus was what held me back. Recently I realised that today there are so many conversational tools already available, why add another one to the mix? I've removed comments from the blog - you can still reply to posts by posting a message to me on Twitter.

The overwhelming reason of my move is simplicity - worrying less about infrastructure and management, and more about posting content. Hopefully Posterous will help me to post more articles and tutorials. For photos and "microblog" posts, I'll continue to use Twitter.

Permalinks

As posterous enforces a different permalink structure to Wordpress, I've put together a pretty hefty htaccess file to ensure old links still work. For reference, my old Wordpress permalink structure was:

bash/yyyy/mm/dd/post-title-of-any-length

Posterous uses the format:

bash/post-title-up-to-45-characters

Some of my permalinks omitted the day (/dd/) entirely. Here are the Apache rewrite rules I've used to redirect posts:

# /yyyy/mm/dd/post-title

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^chrisblunt\.com
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI}% ^/[0-9]{4}/[0-9]{2}/[0-9]{2}/(.{1,45})(.*)$
RewriteRule ^[0-9]{4}/[0-9]{2}/[0-9]{2}/(.{1,45})(.*)$ https://www.chrisblunt.com/$1 [R=301,NC,L]

# /yyyy/mm/post-title
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^chrisblunt\.com
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI}% ^/[0-9]{4}/[0-9]{2}/(.{1,45})(.*)$
RewriteRule ^[0-9]{4}/[0-9]{2}/(.{1,45})(.*)$ https://www.chrisblunt.com/$1 [R=301,NC,L]

The rules aren't perfect - posterous changes some permalinks, specifically those that include numbers and underscores (_). For now, I've just writen redirects for each affected post.

If you find a broken link, please let me know through email (chris at chrisblunt dot com), or Twitter.