Posterous (YC S08) launches private, password-protected blogs by email | Hacker News Reader

Posterous (YC S08) launches private, password-protected blogs by email

blog.posterous.com

58 pointsrantfoil35 comments

The way these guys pump out features, I don't see how any other blogging service can keep up. If other services try to add more engineers it will only slow down their process. Goes to show there's no better way to build a product than with a small group of awesome, dedicated coders.

I think posterous is awesome, and it has become my primary blog, although I don't blog much. That said (and no offense intended), this feature is not exactly groundbreaking. Livejournal, Wordpress, and MoveableType all had stuff like this five years ago, right?

My understanding of how posterous works is to select and implement, cleanly, core functionality in a way that keeps the interface simple. I don't think that posterous out-competes other blog websites (or software) on features.

The most important feature in a blogging platform is the content that's already on it, and in that sense, Posterous still has a lot of catching up to do. More content drives organic growth through links and other SEO mechanisms, which in turn drives more users to sign up.

And when and if you do get that huge growth, all these cool features don't always scale well. I think scaling issues is what really slows down innovation with the big guys.

5 points in <1 minute ;) i can tell you guys roll deep on YC hah

Posterous does "roll deep" on HN, but I'm also really excited about this feature.

The general blog semantic of visible/invisible is simple but underpowered: there are a lot of things I want to show to one group of people that would just be noise to another group. This sort of feature lets me segregate my output.

I'm curious is Posterous thinks tumblr is a competitor?

[PS: is it just me, or are there no theme options at all with Posterous?]

Theming is in our crosshairs right now.

please don't go the tumblr route of having bizarre CSS markup :)

Whats bizarre CSS markup? like {block:Posts}{/block:Posts}?

yeah. Breaks stuff like CSSEdit - which we might not use, but lots of developers do :)

that's not css at all, it's just how the template blocks are defined.

and it's a template engine people who aren't computers can actually understand.

Yeah, but at the same time it's weird when you're theming something and you try to use an editor and for video/audio posts you can't actually see what it looks like.

Any tips, since you're one of the big Tumblr stylists? (Also, did your Dadaist theme ever get made public or was that a demo?)

Just theme it as a static html page with 7 sample posts (or 9, if you want to do each quote size differently) and all the proper pagination and everything. Then once it's all ready to go, save a copy of it as a .txt file and add the blocks in. That part honestly takes about 5 minutes.

That's something I wondered, looking at your theme: does Tumblr auto-handle quote sizes? I've never seen it in any CSS file that I've looked at in any of the themes I've sampled: how do you differentiate?

There is {Length}, which returns either "short", "medium", or "long". Then you just do something like .quote.long {font-size: 50px}

Check out http://www.tumblr.com/docs/custom_themes

Wow. I've never seen that page before. Thanks a ton!

you should make that static html page freely avaliable :)

It varies greatly between different themes, though. I just mean you shouldn't worry about the post blocks until you have all the HTML done.

Shit. I'm now at serious risk of turning into a fanboy.

The only thing that really keeps me from diving in is that my data are owned by someone else. I see I can use it w/ my own domain, which is really cool (http://posterous.com/faq/), but is there any way to import/export data?

My content is precious to me. I don't want to give it to a web startup if I can't get it back.

BUT -- if I post by email, everything I post will be mirrored to my usual email places ...

Leaving only other people's comments on my posts, and submissions to my groups, that I won't be able to archive. (Cue sound of needle scratching across record.)

I can see this might not be a concern for a wide swathe of the potential Posterous user base... but for this prospective user, it matters.

Any plans to implement some data export/migration capabilities, rantfoil?

[edit: maybe there is an option to have other people's comments & posts to my group be forwarded to my email? Don't see it in documentation -- time to make an account & find out if the option is there.]

In the age of open API's, do you need to ask? =)

API's are coming, both for posting and retrieving. It's going to be one of the big tent pole features alongside theming we're excited about in the next few months.

Sounds like a good trajectory.

Although there is a difference between exposing API to developers vs. giving users a feature, my "I want to own my data" worries will be greatly assuaged if a good API exists.

Disqus has/had a great feature where you could get an automated weekly "dump" of all the comments on your site.

How is this different from a friends-only Livejournal?

Looks like you don't need a Posterous account to view password-protected content. Just the password. Not true on LiveJournal. (Not a user of either, yet, but this is how things look on inspection. Corrections/amplifications welcomed.)

There are lots of people in my life who I could give a link and a password to, but who I would not ask to make a LiveJournal account.

yeah this was a big deal for us. Most other sites do access through accounts. That stinks. I want to share my family site with my 100 family members. No way they are going to create accounts. But they do know how to type in a password.

Absolutely right.

Here's an additional use case from my world: I'm in grad school & often want to share data and thoughts with various scientific honchos whose time budgets are very limited.

Now I can cc. a Posterous group called "my advisor might be interested" whenever I send an email. When my advisor gets some downtime, he can check this group out. This lets me communicate in a "non-push" way to him -- I don't clutter his inbox with my email, but I do get to keep him in the loop.

Essentially, this lets me create a "soft" cc. semantic.

I've had this in mind for a while, and made some half-baked efforts to roll my own, but trying out your service will be much easier in the short term.

Keep up the good work!

LJ doesn't really have any good rich media processing, especially over email. Also, LJ doesn't autopost to anywhere else.

Though for public blogs, you can autopost from Posterous to your Livejournal.

As for specific friends-only functionality, this is password protected so people without accounts can easily access it.

While this is a feature you can add to other blogs - I think it has a twitter-like appeal - ease of use, adaptable.

Best of luck.

I hope this gets more people interested in private group sites for families.

If you're looking for family group sites, take a look at my startup: http://ramamia.com

@Posterous: What about a feature that lets you embed your blog anywhere you want, such as on your MySpace page or on your own design?

I think widget embeds are a no-brainer -- we've got a few other big things ahead in the pipe, but I expect this to come later this year.

Posterous seems like a logical place to add support for webhooks, as an alternative to rss and email. They practically have the whole system already, but in email instead.

Any plans to add webhooks functionality?

Well done guys.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com