Posterous releases blog themes | Hacker News Reader

Posterous releases blog themes

blog.posterous.com

103 pointsSam_Odio48 comments

Microblogs have a very interesting hype cycle: first they drop all the features that normal blogs have accumulated over the last ten years.

Then, one at a time, and to great fanfare, they add them back.

Thank you. I dont understand why this is a big feature that needs press. Its just themes?!

This is the feature that I, for one, was waiting for. Considering how great the rest of Posterous is, I expect I am not the only one.

We've never claimed to be a microblog. This has been on the roadmap from the beginning. It's very simple: we listen to users and implement features to delight them and make the service more valuable for them.

I am definitely glad to see the feature added -- I just think the amount of attention it gets is a little excessive.

people are excited by it, nothing wrong with that =)

I've been waiting for it from day one. It literally changes my plans for my blog. My wife loved the backend but hated the front-end looks. It's a big deal to some of us.

literally changes

What would a nonliteral change be?

I don't think the comment is really about microblogs. It's about the cycle of some product becoming popular, adding features, becoming complicated, being competed against by newcomers that say "at least 80% of people don't need 80% of this stuff" and come up with something much simpler that gets the job done, adding features, becoming complicated.

That's not necessarily bad. I don't think byrneseyeview is suggesting this is something you shouldn't do, just observing patterns.

Please implement Markdown next: Markdown is such a perfect match with your email-based submissions.

Garry promised me Markdown was after theming. I'm giving him a day, then I'm breaking his legs.

If you need to run your blog post through a markdown filter, just send it to garry@posterous.com. It might take a few hours, but it will eventually get done.

Other blogging services don't have Posterous' remarkable ease of use. The prior lack of themes has been a turnoff for potential users--now that they're here, it's a no-brainer for those folks.

In a sense, I think that is the life cycle of nearly all software. Eventually it switches back too - stuff becomes big and bloated and suddenly there's a "lite" version.

So, umm, why isn't this a pay feature? I would have paid.

Added: In fact, I do pay monthly for squarespace which you've now got enough theme parity with (at least through the advanced editor) that a geek like me would pay happily.

I would have paid as well.

You're the minority.

This would have been a great opportunity for Posterous to gather data to test their hypothesis. It's obvious that there are passionate people on both ends of the spectrum.

Would people actually -pay- for themes? Why not show some users a link to a "Premium Themes" option and see how far down the funnel they go? If the numbers work out, launch themes as a pay option. It's always easier to go from paid -> free than the other way around.

You are correct, of course. It's a good thing that it doesn't require a majority to make money!

Maybe for the prebuilt themes, but paying for custom CSS is pretty standard.

If they did that, they'd be sacrificing growth for a small amount of revenue. Apparently they highly value growth at this stage.

Finally. Seriously, I've been waiting literally months for this. So long I switched to tumblr in the end, sadly...

just noticed it supports tumblr themes. how clever is that? A+

That's brilliant. It would make converting much easier. Now if only it had Tumblr's social features...

I was wondering how dcurtis was doing it. This is great news. Just in time for me to start a blog.

Could you expand on that comment somewhat? Does http://dustincurtis.com make use of posterious somehow?

http://blog.dustincurtis.com/

http://blog.dustincurtis.com/ uses Posterous.

Ah, thank you. I would love to know how he approaches creating his other website and how he creates his graphics. I love is style.

No. The non-posterous part of the site, he just edits up straight up html, and throws it on apache.

The huge response Posterous gets from their fans for every micro feature they release is because they already have a fan base. The more community or users you have who depend on your service, the more they want a feature. If you start off with an empty blog platform with every feature wordpress has, nobody really cares. OR, if you start off with one really distinguishing feature (Post by Email) and you instantly gain a huge user base who like that, they wait in anticipation for all the small features you can find elsewhere.

Posterous has an awesome foundation to build off of, and because of that they have a real advantage. They can get feedback from a lot of users, including requests for features. What to build? That is easily solved just by listening to what people have to say. They can validate features to build, and are justified in their time by the constant requests for these features.

As soon as they release a feature, they know it's going to be big since the community has been asking. And when it's there, the community feels that they were just given what they've been wanting. Nobody blames them for not having it in the first place, knowing this is a growing app, and are glad to be early adopters.

These guys (garry and sachin) are in a great position, and it's nearly impossible for them to NOT build a great product with all the feedback they are getting.

Javascript is not enabled on Posterous pages for security reasons. We'll be introducing ways you can add your own javascript widgets soon.

I wonder how good their protection is…

I can't find it at the moment, but there's a very cool javascript sandbox system at Google Code somewhere.

I believe it creates an iframe with a separate domain, writes the js into it, and communicates via message passing/anchor etc.

The net result is that you can execute unsafe js, in a sandbox on your page and expose an API to it.

Are you thinking of caja?

http://code.google.com/p/google-caja/

It's not an iframe, it's a capability-based filter which provides more security than an iframe can. A lot of sites use it now that it's reasonably fast...

While I understand _why_ they had to introduce theming, I'm worried about the simplicity that I have come to love in Posterous. I just hope Posterous blogs don't become the next MySpace pages.

Judging by the mostly sane tumblr pages, this won't be an issue.

What other people do to their blogs doesn't affect your blog right? As long as the simplicity isn't removed, I think you can still treat it the same way.

Interestingly, it seems that if you remove the Posterous branding box from the theme template, it still gets added back in during page rendering.

I wish they had JavaScript support in themes.

XSS support isn't a feature.

Both Tumblr and Blogger support JavaScript and they're doing just fine.

I can now use my posterous blog as OpenID

I'll stick with the minimalist default.

I think they should give the chance to choose a name for the url instead of just using the email.

You can do that: post@whatever.posterous.com

Thanks. I wanted to create a blog with name "1-world" but I got an email saying that

"We were unable to post your email:

create a blog to site: 1-world.posterous.com because this site does not exist."

I see that they let you choose the custom url after you create the blog.

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