Maybe it’s human nature, maybe it’s just me, but it seems that as things are in flux I’m more likely to shake a few more things up.

Almost a year ago, Twitter acquired Posterous and then subsequently managed to absolutely kill it. It’s time to change this up.

Posterous is dead

Almost the reasons I chose Posterous seem to now be borked.

  • My auto-posts no longer work, including, get this, Twitter!

  • The theme that once looked great now has scroll bars everywhere.

  • It was easy and quick to set up. Now it feels clunky to get anything to work.

  • It accepted private / custom domains, allowing me to use http://damonoverboe.org.

  • The community presence has died off.

I hung with it for a while, but my activity has definitely suffered because of it. The only thing they still have going for it is one of the big deciding factors on why I chose Posterous, the ability to post via email in Markdown.

Markdown?

Not a single day goes by where I don’t write something in Markdown. I’ve posted about it before, as have many others. It’s plain text that is later rendered to HTML. You’ll see a lot of README.markdown if you look around. I use it for writing emails, taking meeting minutes, templates, and most recently, my resume.

I may be a junky, but I’m not giving it up.

What are my options?

I don’t know them all, I’m sure. I’m looking for something that I can set up and forget, that simply waits for new content to mark up.

I found this post where the author settled on scriptogr.am. He seemed to have somewhat the same goals I id, focus on the content, not the management of the site. It uses Dropbox as the “CMS” and that seems pretty attractive to me. It creates a scriptogram folder in your Dropbox upon giving it permission. Since all of my posts were already archived in a ‘posts’ folder, this will be pretty easy to migrate.

Then there’s Obtvse and Svbtle as apps you an host. MObtvse looks dead simple to implement, but again, I don’t want to have to manage an app if I can avoid it.

Direction for now - scriptogr.am

Most likely, it will be scriptogr.am. It was dead simple to set up, and I already had my posts saved in Dropbox. In fact, while writing this blog, in under two minutes I have set up an account and themed my blog: http://scriptogr.am/damonoverboe

A negative? My posts currently end in .markdown, and I think that’s much more clear than the .md extension that striptogr.am wants. But that’s pretty minor. And I’d call this a wash, but I’ll have to convert all of my headers. Posterous used an almost non-intuitive set of headers with double braces, and they had to be set in the email subject. I hid these in comments, and scritogr.am expects variables in the document instead, similar to S9 (Markdown -> HTML slideshow. PowerPoint is fundamentally flawed, as are all of it’s clones). So I’ll have to make a few changes but that should be pretty simple.

Side note, I’ll be able to hook in my custom domain, damonoverboe.org, as well. I’ll complete that before I nix Posterous altogether, but you shouldn’t see a difference other than a theme change hopefully.