Posterous Migration Guide: All known importers compared | Hacker News Reader

Posterous Migration Guide: All known importers compared

blog.posthaven.com

65 pointsgarry38 comments

Sadly, a lot of the Posterous content will go down with the site on April 30th. Please consider helping out ArchiveTeam to save it. It takes very little bandwidth to make a difference.

http://jacquesmattheij.com/come-help-save-posterous-from-obl...

Is there a way to know how much is left?

So far, out of 9.8 million sites, 1.85 million have been archived.

More info: http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Posterous

I wonder if it would be possible to use digital ocean as an ip pool. Create droplet, start warrior, if your banned kill droplet and create new one. thinking about writing a sunzi script.

That is possible (we had several people using Amazon instances to do it), however the main tracker that usernames get pulled from only hands out users at a limited rate (to prevent us taking down the entire site again)

It's pretty awesome of Garry to think of his users and present all the alternatives, rather than just thinking of his own interests in promoting just Posthaven. Ironically this makes Posthaven and even better option.

"present all the alternatives"

Invariably those comparisons will be framed in a way that makes the product (in this case Posthaven) look good.

This is about facts. Either things work or they don't. If I'm wrong, let me know. garry@posthaven.com

Facts: I imported a dozen blogs with a couple thousand entries and all manner of media embeds. Only took a few clicks and 20 mins; everything worked. I've also emailed with questions about plans, and received prompt personal and fully informative replies.

I had tried WP, Tumblr, and had started to fool with Jekyll when my posthaven invite came through. If you have better things to do with your time than fiddle with blog hosting, this migration is the way to go.

// Tip: Don't pre configure any blogs, just run the import which sets them up for you.

I think garry's interest is actually helping his users more than promoting Posthaven, though. The most selfish reason for helping users is probably to avoid the reputation loss of posterous disappearing without an alternative, more than Posthaven needing to be a big commercial success.

But yes, vendor-provided comparisons are usually selective in what they compare :) In this case I meant that he was presenting alternatives at all, not that the comparison was impartial (which it seems to be). I don't think Posthaven is really a normal commercial enterprise.

While that's true, I did read through his Wordpress overview and I might actually choose them if I want to go the free route, plus I trust the Wordpress brand. There's a risk with bringing up competitors even if it's not in a 100% positive light.

That being said, I'm also concerned about data migration and since Posthaven will be around for at least a couple years (I know they made a promise for longer), I might just go the paid route for seamless integration.

I'd be more interested in Posthaven if there were a way to pay something like $250 once. (maybe following the pinboard model of escalating price)

I think that's not a typical case though. That's just prohibitively high for most people, especially people who don't know whether they can trust the product or want the product that long. I can imagine myself paying paying $5/month for something like this for a couple years, but the chances of me having this as my hosted blog for 10+ years is slim (at $250 the breakeven point for me would be about 3.5 years).

$250 might be the wrong price, then. Maybe it's $100 initially?

It's not so much for my own personal blog but for third party things. Sometimes it's easier to raise money for something all at once, vs. have an ongoing responsibility. If a group wanted to set up something like "Y Combinator Summer 2011 founders", getting people to contribute money up-front might be easier than having to pass the hat every month or year.

Some folks are also working on a jekyll import here:

https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll-import/pull/12

Thanks for this -- I'll check it out when I get a chance later tonight.

I guess I should upload my script that does this with Octopress, and would probably work with Jekyll... Done: https://gist.github.com/nitrogenlogic/5200766

One question Garry, what are the export options from posthaven? (in case we switch and then something terrible happens to posthaven).

We'll write exporters the way Posterous did. Ideally we would work out some way where exporters wouldn't be necessary, e.g. the data appears in some perfect for elsewhere, intact, with the same URL.

Well then. I'm sold. Thanks Garry.

Just signed up - when is the service actually going live?

One more question: when is the post by email function going to be live?

I only tried all the ones I knew about. If there are others, let me know.

Great post, Garry.

I believe you can export from Posterous to Blogger as well.

Perch: http://grabaperch.com/blog/archive/posterous-import-for-perc...

Will Posthaven's importer retain the source of Markdown-based posts? The little bit of blogging I did using Posterous was almost all in Markdown, and when I found out that it wasn't possible to pull the original Markdown using the Posterous API I was pretty bummed out. (although in the end Pandoc did a mostly complete job converting it back) Maybe Posthaven has more access than Joe the API user? The source Markdown exists somewhere in their DB since you can go back and edit it on the site, but I couldn't find any way to get at it via the API. Frankly, if it doesn't retain it (understandable, given Posterous's API) I wouldn't call it 100% lossless.

This is one of the bigger reasons I'd be pretty wary of managed blogs again, although I guess I'm probably not the target audience for them since among the alternatives I'm thinking about is a few Emacs Lisp functions calling Org mode, which I admit is a little fringe.

A warning about the Posterous backup to Wordpress import option - it does not support Unicode. In my Norwegian posts, all foreign characters were exported as "??" in the XML. If Posthaven handles Unicode they'll definetely get my money.

We absolutely do.

Great, thanks for that speedy reply :)

The issue with unicode characters has been resolved. visit posterous.com/#backup and request a new backup.

I took this opportunity to download my Posterous posts, cull the signal, create an Octopress blog, and repost the non-culled posts there.

Was a PITA, took most of a weekend, but left me with a blog more under my control and composed of standardized markup. Don't think I'll be going the blog-as-a-service route again anytime soon.

My thanks and gratitude to @imathis, @mojombo, & co. for Octopress, along with everyone else making similar static site/blog generators.

er, cull the noise.

I think Garry is being pretty genuine here. I suspect some of the snark on this post stems from Posterous's overly aggressive marketing campaign from a few years back which started off here: http://blog.posterous.com/make-the-switch-to-posterous

I created a Python migration tool for Wintersmith (nodejs based static blogging): https://github.com/hamoid/Posterous-to-Wintersmith Maybe the code can serve as an example for other migrations.

> Posthaven is the only place you can save your data safely.

This is false. You can also take the archive you downloaded from Posterous and save it to DropBox, and it will be on both DropBox and your computer's DropBox folder.

I'd really like a Drupal migration path.

This is one of those things I know I need to do, but can't help thinking, 'oh ffs'.

nice to see garry taking care of his users. <3

Reply on news.ycombinator.com