Date: 2013-01-22 Title: With change comes more change Tags: markdown, tools
Maybe it’s human nature, maybe it’s just me, but it seems that as things are in flux I’m more likely to shake a few more things up.
Almost a year ago, Twitter acquired Posterous and then subsequently managed to absolutely kill it. It’s time to change this up.
Almost the reasons I chose Posterous seem to now be borked.
My auto-posts no longer work, including, get this, Twitter!
The theme that once looked great now has scroll bars everywhere.
It was easy and quick to set up. Now it feels clunky to get anything to work.
It accepted private / custom domains, allowing me to use http://damonoverboe.org.
The community presence has died off.
I hung with it for a while, but my activity has definitely suffered because of it. The only thing they still have going for it is one of the big deciding factors on why I chose Posterous, the ability to post via email in Markdown.
Not a single day goes by where I don’t write something in Markdown. I’ve posted about it before, as have many others. It’s plain text that is later rendered to HTML. You’ll see a lot of README.markdown if you look around. I use it for writing emails, taking meeting minutes, templates, and most recently, my resume.
I may be a junky, but I’m not giving it up.
I don’t know them all, I’m sure. I’m looking for something that I can set up and forget, that simply waits for new content to mark up.
I found this post where the author settled on scriptogr.am. He seemed to have somewhat the same goals I id, focus on the content, not the management of the site. It uses Dropbox as the “CMS” and that seems pretty attractive to me. It creates a scriptogram folder in your Dropbox upon giving it permission. Since all of my posts were already archived in a ‘posts’ folder, this will be pretty easy to migrate.
Then there’s Obtvse and Svbtle as apps you an host. MObtvse looks dead simple to implement, but again, I don’t want to have to manage an app if I can avoid it.
Most likely, it will be scriptogr.am. It was dead simple to set up, and I already had my posts saved in Dropbox. In fact, while writing this blog, in under two minutes I have set up an account and themed my blog: http://scriptogr.am/damonoverboe
A negative? My posts currently end in .markdown, and I think that’s much more clear than the .md extension that striptogr.am wants. But that’s pretty minor. And I’d call this a wash, but I’ll have to convert all of my headers. Posterous used an almost non-intuitive set of headers with double braces, and they had to be set in the email subject. I hid these in comments, and scritogr.am expects variables in the document instead, similar to S9 (Markdown -> HTML slideshow. PowerPoint is fundamentally flawed, as are all of it’s clones). So I’ll have to make a few changes but that should be pretty simple.
Side note, I’ll be able to hook in my custom domain, damonoverboe.org, as well. I’ll complete that before I nix Posterous altogether, but you shouldn’t see a difference other than a theme change hopefully.