Posterous cofounders create a replacement: Posthaven

https://posthaven.com

by garry • 13 years ago

226 133 13 years ago

posthaven.com

iSnow2• 13 years ago

Great - until that one gets acquired or acqui-hired by Facebook|MS|Google...

I wish there were some open source resource sharing protocol a bit more high-level than HTTP.

bradgessler• 13 years ago

There is a pledge:

  Our pledge to you...
  We'll never be acquired.
  We'll always keep your URL's online.
  We'll always keep it the best place to post.

And they charge $5 per month, so the sustainability is more clear.

I've talked to Garry and Brett about Post Haven and they are genuinely committed to making this work as they pledge on the website.

zimpenfish• 13 years ago

Instead of a pledge, what about something more concrete and legally binding in the contract?

mirsadm• 13 years ago

Personally I'd be worried about making such claims. It's all great until someone knocks on the door with a bag of cash.

jmathai4• 13 years ago

I can't get to the site so I'm not sure what the details are but if the following aren't in place then those are empty promises.

- Open source the code

- Allow users to supply their own domain

- An API (not "coming soon...")

If all those are in place then great :)

[edit] Looks like the site doesn't support any of the 3 - facepalm

lkrubner• 13 years ago

About this:

>And they charge $5 per month, so >the sustainability is more clear.

In 1996, Geocities began offering a deal: pay $4.95 a month and no ads will be shown on your site, and you get to use your own domain for your website. I signed up immediately. 3 year later, Geocities was acquired by Yahoo. 10 years later, Geocities was closed:

http://geocities.yahoo.com/index.php

There is nothing really permanent about any of these services. Ma Bell may have offered a reliable phone service for almost 100 years, but in the era of the Internet the half-life of consumer sites tends to be much shorter.

garry17• 13 years ago

Like Brad said -- this one is not to be sold. We'll charge money and keep the lights on no matter what. We want to provide this service like a basic utility like water and power, because that's what having a voice on the Internet should be.

fotbr2• 13 years ago

Why should I trust that this will last longer, given the same people are involved? The fact that you charge $5 / month? What do I get for $5 / month versus, say, my own VPS running whatever blog software I choose for the same money (or less)?

groby_b• 13 years ago

I'll believe that once you actually have an escrow policy that e.g. ensures both source and domain names go into the trust of <public domain, non-profit org> if you sell or fold.

Until then, that pledge is just words which can be rescinded any given time.

To be very clear: I am not insinuating you would break your pledge, but as a user, I'd be unwise to trust a non-binding statement on a web page.

evolve2k• 13 years ago

Unfortunately no business regardless of the desire can guarantee it will run forever. It's not a matter of will alone. Any agreement to never sell your shares would imply that a entity structure without shares would better fit your stated motives.

iSnow2• 13 years ago

Sorry, unless you either open-source all your code so anyone can pick up the pieces once you are unwilling or unable to continue or you show me the part of the business that details your contingency plan, this is just sweet talk.

unimpressive• 13 years ago

Design one.

PavlovsCat• 13 years ago

or even better, help these guys out: http://friendica.com/

danielsiders• 13 years ago

This is what we're building with Tent (https://tent.io). The idea is since you can always host your own Tent server, it doesn't matter if your hosting provider shuts down.

You can migrate your data to another server and change your entity (global user identifier) as part of the protocol, so there's no messy "please update your address books" (that part happens automatically.

Data is stored as posts and post types are developer extensible (posts are JSON and binary attachments), so if your favorite app is discontinued, another developer can make a great app that interacts with the same post types.

We're working on a Tent app that imports Posterous posts right now.

aaronpk4• 13 years ago

Sustainable. "503 Service Unavailable"

jaredstenquist• 13 years ago

Love the irony!

garry17• 13 years ago

It's back. Sorry about that.

We're starting over from scratch with a new codebase only recently, and there's infrastructure we still need to build. I scaled Posterous from nothing to tens of millions of uniques with my cofounder Brett, so we'll be able to keep it online for the long haul.

Please bear with us though through this launch period.

aaronpk4• 13 years ago

I believe you. Just thought it was a wonderful bit of irony :)

evv• 13 years ago

It's not back for me. You guys must be sweating right now

bfe3• 13 years ago

Thanks very much for making this available, garry, I appreciate it.

(FYI I'm still getting the 503 for now but I'll keep checking in.)

garry17• 13 years ago

Please visit https://posthaven.com for now. Brett and I are working on fixing the servers asap.

bfe3• 13 years ago

Thanks. Getting an SSL connection error there, and it's actually sunny in Portland right now so I need to get outside for a run, I'll check back after.

jeremymcanally• 13 years ago

I can sign up but submitting payment is still throwing errors. Is that normal right now? :/

webwanderings3• 13 years ago

What does it offer for $5 a month? Wordpress.com charges as well and the bill runs up to a lot of money for typical bells and whistles needed to run a blog. Google blogspot is still pretty much free all around. Tumblr is the same.

garry17• 13 years ago

We think the world still needs a Posterous-like blog engine that is simpler to use for everyone else. Posterous got quite complicated after I left, and I think the world needs the simple version again quite a lot.

webwanderings3• 13 years ago

The world has an option to sign-up for a free blog through Google, Tumblr and even wordpress.com (though Wordpress.com's free is not free like Google/Tumblr). So what makes you think the world will sign up for $5 service?

wiwillia• 13 years ago

Google, Tumblr, etc. all have investors and shareholders which are trying to turn a profit. I think the idea here (and Garry can correct me if I'm wrong) is that they'll never take on outside funding or entertain selling the company, the sole purpose of the site will be to build something that is sustainable and lasting as opposed focusing on profit.

webwanderings3• 13 years ago

That's exactly why $5 doesn't seem like a transparent deal right now. It is also not clear who is the target audience here. The average person who would sign-up for a blog, wouldn't shell out $5 so easily, and a professional blogger would look at it suspiciously to begin with (given the extremely early stage). It would be better if that reference to $5 is clarified in-depth, or taken out altogether with a different kind of explanation.

aaronpk4• 13 years ago

I'm curious how you guys arrived at $5/month. Is it based more on what you expect people are willing to pay, or based more on how much you expect this to cost to operate?

minimaxir• 13 years ago

Whoever made this should submit an application to be in the next YC batch. I have a strong feeling they would get in. :)

dylangs1030• 13 years ago

The cofounders of Posterous. They don't need YC. They were in YC.

TheMakeA• 13 years ago

And garry is actually a partner at YC now anyway.

amirmc• 13 years ago

One of them, Garry, is a YC partner [1]

[1] http://ycombinator.posterous.com/welcome-garry-and-aaron

[The irony of linking to a Posterous post is not lost on me - I wonder when that link will be dead]

g2bsocial• 13 years ago

Not real impressed that it can't handle a HN load.

garry17• 13 years ago

We fixed one setting in our HAProxy that was causing an insane bottleneck.

We'd been working on it for a while, but had no idea it would be launching today and should have been more prepared.

Sorry about that. Please give us another shot.

jbail3• 13 years ago

How can anyone believe this will hold true? Especially coming from the founders of Posterous who sold out and then shuttered their service?

Was Posterous created to not be sustainable? If so, then Posterous's users were duped from the get go into using something that the founders knew wasn't sustainable and would eventually disappear. That's not a good way to treat users and it surely doesn't inspire confidence in the founders' next projects.

Honestly, I find pitching this service on the day of the news that Posterous is shutting down to be kind of tacky. I'm not trolling or trying to be negative...I'm just suspicious of why anyone should trust this.

jmathai4• 13 years ago

The only exchange I've had with one of the founders (Garry) was on Twitter when a YC company named SnapJoy launched a campaign to "free your photos" from Flickr.

The only problem was that SnapJoy was a bigger black hole than Flickr was. An API to access your photos was coming soon for months and never came before they were acquired by Dropbox.

Somehow he was arguing around that point. Unsure how but it couldn't possibly have made sense.

I have nothing against Garry or anyone else involved in these projects/companies but it goes a long way to hurt those of us [1] trying to build software where users actually control and retain ownership of their data.

[1] I founded The OpenPhoto Project in 2011

https://github.com/photo

http://theopenphotoproject.org

garry17• 13 years ago

When I started working on Posterous in 2008, I intended to work on it forever. It didn't work out that way, and I left in January of 2011. It was a venture-funded company by then and we were committed to super-growth, not sustainability. We never started charging for the product.

Posthaven is the result of my experience with that. I know the world needs a simple, clean, well-lit, easy place to post. One that doesn't force us to make the same kind of product decisions that we had to before.

I promise you we are focused on making this a long term project. It's not a startup and Brett and I are committed to making it work over the long haul.

8ig82• 13 years ago

What about making this a non-profit, run by a board?

Different idea, but, for example Matt M. created the WordPress Foundation to independently carry out the things he believed in.

http://wordpressfoundation.org/

jbail3• 13 years ago

On the one hand, you have street cred for building an awesome product which inspires confidence that your next product will be awesome too. I don't doubt it will be awesome.

But on the other hand, you did accept VC funding for Posterous (I'm assuming nobody was holding a gun to your head and forced you to do it), and for whatever reason you then left and moved onto other projects.

Now you are saying you will never sell out, will never lose focus and will stick around forever. Isn't that like a politician promising they won't ever raise taxes? "Ever" is just a really strong word. Life happens. Priorities change. Heck, most marriages don't even last forever.

That said...

I believe you. I think you're telling the truth about how you actually feel right now and what your plans for the business are right now. It's just that right now only lasts an instant.

rubyrescue• 13 years ago

since you're posting here, you have a grocer's apostrophe on the home page... it's "URLs", not "URL's".

second, can we auto-migrate somehow from a posterous backup - my wife runs a blog on posterous and is really worried that she needs to migrate. if i could tell her that she just now needs to pay $5/month and not rely on me to hack something together w/octopress and github she will be so excited.

a4agarwal• 13 years ago

We both wanted hyper growth. We both wanted venture funding. We both wanted a lasting company. It's not easy and I didn't quit.

I built a team. Accountability and execution in the company. It's not as easy as it sounds.

We made mistakes and learned. I think everyone did well and are on to great things.

tferris2• 13 years ago

> When I started working on Posterous in 2008 ..

Just wondering: how can somebody start again something he worked already years on? I understand that you might learned a lot with Posterous and now you'd like to just employ that knowledge in a new blog project. But is it not a bit dangerous to stick to the same thing over years? You could loose time and after ten years looking back and you pity that you just worked only on blog systems. I don't want to talk blogs down, they are a very interesting use case and I still think there's room for improvement but in terms of spreading the bets and just the need to start something totally new I am a bit confused that you do the same thing over and over again (and I didn't see any disruptive feature or new angle with Posthaven).

qeorge• 13 years ago

the founders of Posterous who sold out and then shuttered their service

Seriously? Just gonna throw 'em under the bus like that? Friends like these..

Its time to stop trotting out this meme that the alternative to an "aquihire" was a sustainable business. Sometimes you've got to fish or cut bait.

Ad hominem aside, trust should never be required for a good agreement. PostHaven has made a great start by killing any acquisition value from Day 1 by making their defining feature a promise never to sell. If they follow that up with e.g., transferring control of posthaven.com to a well-regarded foundation like Wikimedia, the EFF, or archive.org they could further remove the trust requirement from the contract they are forming with their users. That'd be great.

jbail3• 13 years ago

There's nothing wrong with selling out. I assume Posterous was founded to make a profit at some point and selling out allowed them to do that. I'm actually 100% okay with that. I was merely calling out that "never selling out" is a strange proposal coming from someone with a track record for selling out...on the day that this former sold out service announces it is shutting down forever.

It might just be bad timing to announce the next project more than anything.

shrikant• 13 years ago

> PostHaven has made a great start by killing any acquisition value from Day 1 by making their defining feature a promise never to sell.

Just like OkCupid's intensive, well-researched, data-driven post on why online dating needs to be free scared off Match.com from acquiring them?

OGC• 13 years ago

What the hell are Wikimedia, the EFF or archive.org going to do with a blog hoster?

Idk, but people really need to stop hyping this. It's just some company hosting _blogs_ get over yourself.

marginalboy• 13 years ago

I don't think you're being very fair. You're suggesting a false dichotomy.

sfard• 13 years ago

For those interested, I built http://throwww.com which is a free (and with an obvious bias) better alternative.

cuchi_costa• 13 years ago

Hey sfard, how do i reach you?

largesse2• 13 years ago

This begs the question: if the acquisition was talent acquisition why couldn't they have just sold the Posterous name and software?

jerrya• 13 years ago

Back a month or so when Quora announced blogs, I said a better move would have been for Quora to pickup the Posterous service.

ricardobeat• 13 years ago

http://begthequestion.info

largesse2• 13 years ago

Descriptivist. Sorry ;-)

Jeraimee2• 13 years ago

I don't trust it. After having to get another VPS and build (read: piece together) my own Posterous-like system (it's not half as good) I've already paid $$$. Paying these guys 5 bucks more with no way to know the same thing will or won't happen doesn't seem sane. The system doesn't even WORK yet! How dare they.

garry17• 13 years ago

We just fixed a major problem with our HAProxy instance. The floodgates are open and everything is working awesome now. Please come back and give us another chance.

We had no idea when Posterous would shut down -- it's been a project Brett and I have been working on in our spare time for a while and we had to literally scramble to get this into launch-ready state.

We fixed it (in case you're wondering, make sure your HAProxy Maxconn setting is high enough, say 1024 connections, if you're serving static assets behind it in addition to dynamic content.) and we hope you'll give us one more shot.

r0s• 13 years ago

Why would you invent your own system? They have migration tools for existing frameworks...

Jeraimee2• 13 years ago

I cobbled a system together from existing options. I may however - build my own 'alike and open source it after all this.

peterkelly• 13 years ago

Or you could set up your own domain + wordpress installation and not have to rely on any one company remaining in existence forever.

It's pretty easy to switch if necessary (admittedly assuming you have the right technical skills).

helloamar• 13 years ago

If you can have a option of installing your platform on our own server like Wordpress, most of us won't hesitate to sign up

pmtarantino• 13 years ago

If I read it correctly, you can pay only the months when you write a post. If you don't plan to write this month, you can avoid paying.

ChuckMcM• 13 years ago

Its an interesting proposition, but fundamentally broken. Lets say you build it (and frankly I think a better course here would have been something based on the app.net model rather than WP Engine model) and its "successful" what does that mean to you?

Here is the challenge, there are too many scenarios where you don't want to be.

#1) "SPLOGGING" or some random thing becomes the new thing which all the cool kids are doing. You've got just enough customers to keep you in Ramen so you're committed to working until you're 70 and can augment your income with Social Security to honor this commitment to those few.

#2) You've spent 20 years maintaining the service, answering the same questions, fighting the same fires, dealing with the same sort of "Chrome v286 can't display tri-graphs properly without mime support from the replacement for nginx" kinds of problems.

#3) Its wildly successful and someone offers to make you a billionaire if you sell it to them?

In contrast I like the foundation idea. Foundations don't get tired, they don't get tempted, they just execute against their created principals. A foundation with an endowment that runs a service which supplies a voice for bloggers for a computed value which is not to exceed 15% of the operating cost of the service. That is a durable kind of construction, the people in it are just employees, they turn over like students in a college or wait staff at a restaurant. Its a chunk of money, controlled by a legal document, implemented by a management structure, to create a service in perpetuity.

Don't build a business and promise not to sell it, build an institution that is self contained.

garry17• 13 years ago

Thanks for this note. It's very much great advice, and right now we're heads down coding. I've never started a foundation and I have much more reading to do -- but it sounds like the right way to codify our pledge more permanently.

8ig82• 13 years ago

A foundation is basically a way of separating you from your current ideals. The reality is that it is easy for a person to get tempted by external factors: you need to pay the rent, you feel like people are taking advantage of your offering. There is a lot of liability there. Too risky for me to invest. But, if you establish a group of people that are not personal stakeholders, they believe in the cause, and it is very difficult to them to individually change direction, I'll be more likely to trust and provided financial support.

Basically you're one person and you're human and we know how humans act. A foundation provides some insurance for my investment.

joeyh2• 13 years ago

A foundation is one approach, and a valid one. You might end up with something like archive.org, except with a Wayback Machine that serves up actual historical content. (This would be an interesting direction for archive.org to take their Wayback Machine, if they could get sites like Posterus to donate the domain and data at shutdown.)

Another approach is to build a service where you make no promises about hosting content forever, but find ways to ensure that users own their data, and have full freedom of migration if you should close down.

Since 2010 I've been running http://branchable.com/ , which takes this approach. The same git clone of their site that users can make to edit it contains all their data and configuration. It's built on an open engine http://ikiwiki.info/ , so users can switch away at any time, with no conversion. Ikiwiki is a static site builder, so users can host on S3 or github, or anywhere if they decide to stop using Branchable. Even the management and business logic are open software, so if we folded tomorrow and someone wanted, they could recreate us using http://ikiwiki-hosting.branchable.com/

Branchable is not designed to have a fast burn, but we've had slow and steady growth, and happy users who continue paying the bills each month.

There's a lot of room in this space for sites serving different sets of users in ways that don't turn them into extruded VC product, so welcome to it!

joeyh2• 13 years ago

An interesting term to look up when considering something like this is the cost to "endow a terabyte": To ensure that it's preserved continually, paid as an up-front cost.

IIRC archive.org manages this for somewhere around $2000 per terabyte. There's a lot of interesting research into predicting how changes in drive prices etc will play out and affect this number, that you can find by googleing the term.

argumentum• 13 years ago

Why are people so cynical? I know garry, and he is one of the most honest and generous people around. I signed up .. posterous was awesome and should live on.

From personal experience, doing a startup is so hard that judging the co-founders without knowing the full context is just wrong.

conroy• 13 years ago

A sustainable replacement already exists: statically generated website on S3. You own the domain, and there is very little chance that S3 is going away anytime soon.

It will also be cheaper than $5/month.

eel• 13 years ago

This may seem like a silly question, but can I cancel at any time? It says $5 a month forever, and I don't see any terms of service.

wyck• 13 years ago

I'm sorry but the only thing that lives up to this kind of hype is open source and run by a community.

I'll stay with Jekyll and WordPress.

mceoin• 13 years ago

Hi Garry,

This is a simple feature request but as someone who writes occasionally it is really important to me: will I be able to customize the domain name to have it as myname.com instead of posthaven.com/myname?

garry17• 13 years ago

Yes, this will definitely be in the product and supported 100%.

benrhughes2• 13 years ago

This would have been perfect around a year ago. Once the writing was on the wall, I migrated 4 or 5 sites (kinda, mostly) to self hosted Wordpress. I would have happily shelled out $5/mth to go to posthaven, had it existed.

Because WP bugs me, I've written my own lightweight markdown based thing in node[1] that I'm gradually moving everything to.

On the upside, the Posterous thing finally taught me to not rely fully on free services, no matter how good the feature set.

[1]http://github.com/benrhughes/crashdown

woah• 13 years ago

Why not just use docpad? https://github.com/bevry/docpad

benrhughes2• 13 years ago

Because it's taken me less time to write my own thing, that does exactly what I want, than it usually takes me to configure and customise wordpress.

Also, (and this is the main reason, really) it's just a lot of fun.

jwwest2• 13 years ago

So much negativity for something that doesn't matter all that much. Does anyone believe that anything can truly be around forever? Will Posthaven be around in 5 years? Probably. 10? Looking dimmer. 20? No way.

I look at it like your favorite store. Every year the odds of something dramatic happening in which it will shut down are played against it. Everything is transient, it's life. I've bounced around a lot of blogging platforms, and personally it's not a huge deal at all. Sure, it's a bit of a pain to spend a day or so settling in and changing your DNS, but is it really that bad?

When someone says "it'll be around forever" my BS radar starts beeping like mad. And that's ok.

gudman• 13 years ago

How can anyone make this kind of promise?

geuis• 13 years ago

I'm curious about the need to build this from a new code base. Posterous already exists. Why not negotiate a deal with twitter to aquire the code and start posthaven from that? Indeed, why not also aquire the posterous domain and just migrate to new servers? Put all existing blogs on lockdown, and if people want to continue as posterous customers they start paying $5 a month.

rdl• 13 years ago

What's the advantage of posthaven over svbtle?

kkt262• 13 years ago

This idea seems ridiculous. I really hope your main selling point is not the fact that your website will last forever.

Let's not even go into the fact that there's a high likelihood this project won't even take off considering the high amount of competition out there.

But there are tons of uncontrollable situations that you MIGHT run into, even if there's a 0.01% chance that it will happen.

- What if someone sues you and you go bankrupt?

- What if someone offers to buy you out for 1 billion dollars?

- What if (God forbid) one of the original founders passes away and the rest of the founders decide it's no longer worth it to keep it going?

- What if the founding team just realizes the project is no longer for them?

- What if after the founding team retires, the people that they pass it onto decide THEY don't want to keep going with it?

I'm just not buying it, and I feel like a lot of people will have the same skepticism.

fiendsan• 13 years ago

yeah im gonna skip on that one... track record and all...

antirez• 13 years ago

It's very peculiar that the way this service is presented is the exception, while it should be the rule. Actually most businesses should try to have this in mind: provide a service that users want and are willing to pay for and try to be cheap and sustainable.

I understand there is also space for "give it for free, grow like crazy", but the fact that it is now the norm is extremely odd IMHO. Most founders now optimize for VC rounds apparently.

davewiner2• 13 years ago

Garry, thanks for doing this new project. We need services that are sustainable long-term. We need a solid ad-free place that people can post their thoughts and have a decent chance of having them stick around as long as the web exists.

Also suggest that you think about a pre-paid plan, for say $1000, to purchase lifetime hosting, assuming you can find a way to invest the money that pays a return that sustains the service.

Also consider partnering with some long-lived institutions, like universities, that might play a role in guaranteeing the "forever" part of the proposition.

Another possibility -- sell stock to your users. There's no reason you can't make a fortune doing this. But if you go with VC money that's going to put you on a path that isn't sustainable. If you sell stock to the public with the clear up-front understanding that this is to be a sustainable business, that might strengthen the company, not weaken it.

davewiner2• 13 years ago

BTW, I received my Posterous archive and linked to it from this piece, in case anyone wants to explore.

http://threads2.scripting.com/2013/february/posterousArchive

dnrevel• 13 years ago

@ScoopIt (curation) launched with a layered, freemium model that made sense, as compared to the discussions around Posterous I heard, that even non-techies asked about -- what IS the funding model for Posterous.

I like the idea of $5/month. Why not sell it??? Let go of it twitter!!!

I've been a BIG Posterous fan, have 20+ blogs on it public and private, used to run a few courses, but started pulling away when the rumors and the "BackUp" button appeared.

It's NOT too late, is it? What a great story it would make to pull it back from the brink for all those semi-tech literates who can build wonderful sites on Posterous. Does someone need to start a petition to bug twitter about this??

oob205• 13 years ago

Why promise to be around forever? Glad they are working toward a sustainable business, but "made to last" is good, "made to last forever" is hyperbole. No company can guarantee that, no matter how good.

Blogette• 13 years ago

1. When Garry says "forever," I think he means in comparison to the now-dead posterous; & not necessarily "forever" as in "All of God's Eternity"!

2. At least you picked a decent name, PostHaven. I always hated the name Posterous. And the brown/yellow logo. Ugh!

3. As a non-techie I would pay $60/year for 10-blogs, BUT NOT if it will be as bad as Posterous which worked like pure crap for email-posting (yet that was their big Come On!) From Summer 2009 for 6 months it worked fine, then something changed & it never worked well after that (only headlines would post with empty body content!!!) Wasted TONS of time & energy trying to get answers from them & only got the run-around. It was a miserable nightmare for 20-months when I finally bailed in Spring 2011 & went to WP.com, & that was after seeing a post at Computerworld that there was a bug between Gmail & Posterous!!! Yet Posterous didn't know that? Pfff! Wp.com works excellent for email-posting & w/Gmail/iPhone. Make it like WP.com & maybe will consider...

4. Do not make the account-email address the ONLY addy that can be email-posted FROM. Give us a "special post to" addy like WP does so we can post by email from ANY of our email addys, & not just the ONE connected to account. That was another royal PITA thing about Posterous. We should not have to add ALL of our addys as add'l "users" just to be able to post-by-email from DIFFERENT addys. I cannot even express how arse-backward-miserable that set-up was!! If PostHaven sets it up that same way, no thanks!

5. Do not have Tags in the Subject Line like Posterous did!! Did it ever occur to those guys we might send our post to Posterous & elsewhere at the same time? (such as Email Groups?) Then the other list shows the stupid Tags in the Subject Line! Bad idea!

6. Don't make the Default "Gallery" so that we have to type "NO GALLERY" in every stinking email! Or at least let US, the user, SET the DEFAULT CHOICE.

7. Let us choose AT LEAST 1-global FONT for the blog body & headlines, VERDANA, crystal clear, best READABLE font.

8. Let us choose AT LEAST 2-global Font SIZES for the blog body text & headline. NO TEENY TINY STINKING FONT SIZES!

9. Let us choose AT LEAST 3-global Font COLORS: links, headlines, body text (#000000 BLACK body TEXT >> & NO STINKING "INVISIBLE GREY" FONT ANYWHERE!!)

WP.com wants $30/YEAR for the "privilege" to change global font, font size, font colors. If it was a one-time-$30-fee, fine, but not every year (10 blogs would be $300 PER YEAR just to have a decent font!)

10. Let us choose ALL Theme COLORS, background, menu bars, Blog's Title, etc.

11. Themes: WP.com & Posterous both have & had CRAPPY UGLY themes. You can tell that it is mostly GUYS designing all the hideous themes, because women would know better! (design, colors, layout, FUNCTION), but unfortunately, we are not the tech geeks! If PostHaven themes will be as crappy, it won't be worth switching, unless total flexibility is INCLUDED (see #8-9-10 above).

--Have several "Magazine" type themes, Photoblogging themes, Portfolio themes, etc., that actually WORK with EMAIL-blogging! (Most of them DON'T, including the one Posterous had! The first photo should show up on site but they never did! -- The only WP.com "magazine" theme that works w/email-posting is Triton Lite & it has a hideous white film over it & TEEEENY TINY INVISIBLE GREY FRONT, making it a total loser of a theme).

--Or, let us dl free or paid themes from 3rd parties elsewhere to use on our blogs & you guys could forego the whole themes disasters. (WP.com has paid themes but quite pricey $75-$150, & I think you STILL have to buy the CSS Upgrade just to change fonts/sizes/colors!)

12. Let us decide WHERE we want the DAY, DATE, & TIME of each post! (At the TOP, under the Headline, NOT out to the side wasting space, NOR at the bottom of the posts! Ugh!)

13. WIDGETS! & SHORTCODES! (for archives, search, RSS Feeds, Twitter Stream, HTML-Text-&-Images boxes, videos, etc.) Frankly, I don't see why the wheel needs to be RE-invented... it must be a "guy thing." Just copy what WP.com has already invented, but add the flexibility that WP.com does not include & I would gladly give you $60/year for 10-blogs.

14. Oh, & allow users to have ADS!!! Posterous was always promising they were going to allow users to have ads, but they never did (all the while they were Vigi-linking everyone's blogs!)

15. And if being able to use our own domains is INCLUDED, that would be GREAT. WP.com wants $18/Year for that privilege (10 blogs = $180) plus annual domain fees.

16. Will PostHaven be hosting .PDFs, .MP3s, Videos, etc. like Posterous did? That was ONE good thing!

17. BUT I'm not willing to sign up in advance because there's no way to know if any of the other above miseries from prior Posterous & current WP.com will be the same at PostHaven or not. But will keep an eye out to see how it develops.

Posterous cofounders create a replacement: Posthaven

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