I’ve been a strong supporter of Posterous ever since I sent my first email to create my Posterous site way back in 2008. It was just about the most amazing thing I’d seen at the time. Super simple site creation and updating – an amazing tool. I’ve trained more teachers that I can remember how to use it to create an easy-to-update and maintain teacher web site, and now this service is going away as of April 30 due to the purchase of Posterous by Twitter. This saddens me quite a bit, because I have 5+ years of content on my Posterous site that I just can’t loose.
My blog has moved to the WordPress platform. I’m using the self-hosted version that is downloadable from WordPress.org, but I think that a free WordPress.com site is more than sufficient for most teachers. The main reason for the move is because I was able to import ALL of my Posterous posts and images to my new site with the help of an import tool. Also, with the help of some good tools and plugins detailed below, I can get my new WP dog to do the same tricks I loved in Posterous. Unfortunately, my embedded videos and documents that I’ve uploaded did not come over, so I’ll loose some of these until I go back and fix each effected post, which could take some time.
To help other teachers in this circumstance, I’ll point you to some good help to make the transition as easy and painless as possible.
- Import from Posterous to WordPress – these instructions will walk you through how to backup your Posterous site data (which you should do regardless!) and then import it to a new WordPress.com blog or site. The WordPress Importer PlugIn worked for me on my hosted site.
- Post by Email – this was one of my favorite features of the Posterous platform, and you can do this with a WordPress site as well.
- Publicize – One of the features of Posterous that I really liked was that it would automatically update my Twitter account and Facebook Fan Page when I published a new post. The Publicize tool can be configured to do this on a WordPress.com blog. If you are self-hosting, the Jetpack plugin will add this feature and much more.
- Ultimate Follow Me – this is an easy to set up plugin that will give you a sidebar module with quick links to any or all of the social sites you may use to make it quick and easy for people to follow you.
I will update this post with more of the tools and plugins that I’m using and liking on my new site. Now, back to work!