So my previous blogging engine (Posterous) is shutting it's doors in a month which forced me to transition to a new home, even though I'm not blogging regularly these days.
I explored following Scott King over to Tumblr (after all, I use it for another seldom-updated blog cleggslist), but a few things bothered me about the migration:
- you lost the hyperlinks (I still get about 50 visits per day from referrals that go directly to old content);
- many of the image and video content didn't migrate over; and
- there were limits to the number of posts that you could pull over at one time without using a paid service.
After mulling it over a bit, which included thoughts about building my own blogging engine, I came across an invitation from a couple of early Posterous employees to try out Posthaven. After taking a look at some of the features, I tried it out and am extremely happy I did. It's very clean, fast and easy to use (things that used to be hallmarks of Posterous, but they veered far off that path long ago). Pages don't take forever to load, there aren't a bunch of gimmicks, and it's just a pleasure to use. When reaching out to the company for support (requesting a new feature), the response was quick and friendly. I also love the front-end design.
It's $5/month but it is well worth it. I love that there's a revenue model to support something worthwhile like a super clean blogging engine. I feel somewhat at peace with the sense that the founders of Posthaven aren't going to suddenly try to come up with a way to stay alive by selling my content, advertising through my content, or adding a bunch of bloat to the infrastructure of the site.
Despite having the best of the old Posterous baked in to the site and the promise not to get too crazy with unneeded features, a few things that I hope they add in the future (some of which might be there and I'm just missing it):
- Some ability for basic skinning and inserting custom code/widgets
- Social notification upon posting
- Tags
- Google Analytics
- API
- RSS
Congratulations to the Posthaven team on a great product. I'm very happy to have made the transition.