Migrating from posterous to wordpress - http://kabads.monkeez.org
Since posterous announced they have been acquired by twitter, I and many others, have been thinking that posterous may not be around for much longer. The FAQ posted makes reference to the team now working on twitter products and how they will announce details of exporting your data out of posterous when/if the time comes that the service will change. This is not looking good, so I made the decision to switch back to wordpress. Posterous has been good, but free is price does not mean that you get the best service in the long term. However, with wordpress, you get exactly the service that you create. So, I've installed plugins to wordpress in an attempt to recreate the service they offer.
I managed to set up my posterous account (luckily, I didn't have that many posts) to autopost to my new wordpress blog. Unfortunately, posterous doesn't yet offer an export tool, apart from the autopost. They took 15 days to create 15 import tools - (http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2010/jul/12/posterous-wordpress?INTCMP=SRCH) - how long will they take to create 15 export tools?
Initially, I liked posting by email, so I looked at the plugins. The original install of wordpress already has this function, but there are other plugins that extend this much further than the default install. So I found a plugin called Postie - (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/postie/changelog/) - this plugin looked great, but it seems that people have had problems installing this on my webhost - so I had to give up. Instead, I've gone with the default install which means I don't get to post inline images - something Postie offered. I set up a gmail account with a random string of letters prefixed by my blog title and then configured wordpress to check that email address (http://codex.wordpress.org/Post_to_your_blog_using_email). I also had to set up a cron job to check the http://mywebsite.com/wp-mail.php file so that I didn't have to browse that address every time - 1,16,31,46 /usr/bin/wget -N http://mydomain.com/wp-mail.php does this for me every 15 minutes.
Next, I installed the Twitter Tools plugin (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/twitter-tools/) which integrates wordpress with twitter. This was the trickiest to set up, but for an advanced user, it isn't that bad. You configure the plugin by creating an app for your twitter account. When you do this, you create a Consumer Key, Consumer Secret, Access Token and Access Token secret. Feed these strings in to your plugin settings and then your accounts will synchronise. You can then create blog posts from twitter posts and twitter posts from blog posts - very similar to posterous.
Instead of relying on a now unreliable service, I've managed to free my posts. The only downside currently is that I cannot use inline images in email to post. I've yet to set up things like scribd documents, but I hardly used those anyway. Posterous never worked when exporting to my picasa account - I will try this next with wordpress. If you've got any other tips, please post in the replies.
