Posterous, Tumblr, and blogging outposts

Fettuccine with Dungeness crabI was always a Posterous user over a Tumblr user.

How did I use Posterous? I would email photos, take random quotes from websites, etc. and ensure it made it to my “outpost”. I had stopped using Posterous a little before the Twitter acquisition, and didn’t care much for it when it shutdown. I did take a backup of my stuff though, because it never was federated to my own blog or anything like that. I did like the fact that it would post links to Twitter automatically and would save my images to Flickr as a backup bucket for my photos. 

How did I use Tumblr? It claims I have 11,766 items, which you can say is a mirror of my tweets for a period of time. It also contained a mirror of my Posterous posts. In fact it shows that it might have stopped not long after the iPhone 4 came to Malaysia and I visited Phnom Penh for a barcamp. So it does bring back memories. I just found the mass post editor – last Tumblr entry was October 2010. Apparently I started using it in June 2007. It might have even fed my last.fm feed to it as I can see music being popped in during the early days. It also states my timezone was GMT+10, so definitely legit – I was living in Melbourne then.

I decided not to delete this archive (just to rename the subdomain with the -old tag – very handy). However the new blog will never be my primary blog due to Tumblr’s architecture.

So I guess that puts an end to the re-Tumblr experiment. I even had the bookmarklet installed in the browser raring to go.

WordPress has aside support. I don’t use it here but its almost similar to a service like Tumblr, no? I guess it goes back to owning your content – I’m a fan of keeping things here on a site that I control (note that I don’t use wordpress.com either).

That said, Posterous sold for a lot less to Twitter (I speculate). Tumblr sold for $1.1 billion to Yahoo!. Let’s hope all is well, failing which users will be a migrating. 


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