Posterous Migration Guide: All known importers compared

http://blog.posthaven.com/the-posterous-migration-guide

by garry • 13 years ago

65 38 13 years ago

blog.posthaven.com

jroes• 13 years ago

Some folks are also working on a jekyll import here:

https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll-import/pull/12

garry5• 13 years ago

Thanks for this -- I'll check it out when I get a chance later tonight.

nitrogen• 13 years ago

I guess I should upload my script that does this with Octopress, and would probably work with Jekyll... Done: https://gist.github.com/nitrogenlogic/5200766

mbs348• 13 years ago

nice to see garry taking care of his users. <3

garry5• 13 years ago

I only tried all the ones I knew about. If there are others, let me know.

jbail• 13 years ago

Great post, Garry.

I believe you can export from Posterous to Blogger as well.

Isofarro• 13 years ago

Perch: http://grabaperch.com/blog/archive/posterous-import-for-perc...

rdl4• 13 years ago

It's pretty awesome of Garry to think of his users and present all the alternatives, rather than just thinking of his own interests in promoting just Posthaven. Ironically this makes Posthaven and even better option.

niggler• 13 years ago

"present all the alternatives"

Invariably those comparisons will be framed in a way that makes the product (in this case Posthaven) look good.

garry5• 13 years ago

This is about facts. Either things work or they don't. If I'm wrong, let me know. garry@posthaven.com

rdl4• 13 years ago

I think garry's interest is actually helping his users more than promoting Posthaven, though. The most selfish reason for helping users is probably to avoid the reputation loss of posterous disappearing without an alternative, more than Posthaven needing to be a big commercial success.

But yes, vendor-provided comparisons are usually selective in what they compare :) In this case I meant that he was presenting alternatives at all, not that the comparison was impartial (which it seems to be). I don't think Posthaven is really a normal commercial enterprise.

jonathanjaeger2• 13 years ago

While that's true, I did read through his Wordpress overview and I might actually choose them if I want to go the free route, plus I trust the Wordpress brand. There's a risk with bringing up competitors even if it's not in a 100% positive light.

That being said, I'm also concerned about data migration and since Posthaven will be around for at least a couple years (I know they made a promise for longer), I might just go the paid route for seamless integration.

rdl4• 13 years ago

I'd be more interested in Posthaven if there were a way to pay something like $250 once. (maybe following the pinboard model of escalating price)

Samuel_Michon2• 13 years ago

Sadly, a lot of the Posterous content will go down with the site on April 30th. Please consider helping out ArchiveTeam to save it. It takes very little bandwidth to make a difference.

http://jacquesmattheij.com/come-help-save-posterous-from-obl...

NoahTheDuke• 13 years ago

Is there a way to know how much is left?

Samuel_Michon2• 13 years ago

So far, out of 9.8 million sites, 1.85 million have been archived.

More info: http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Posterous

blahbap2• 13 years ago

A warning about the Posterous backup to Wordpress import option - it does not support Unicode. In my Norwegian posts, all foreign characters were exported as "??" in the XML. If Posthaven handles Unicode they'll definetely get my money.

garry5• 13 years ago

We absolutely do.

blahbap2• 13 years ago

Great, thanks for that speedy reply :)

a4agarwal• 13 years ago

The issue with unicode characters has been resolved. visit posterous.com/#backup and request a new backup.

r0s• 13 years ago

I'd really like a Drupal migration path.

joelrunyon4• 13 years ago

One question Garry, what are the export options from posthaven? (in case we switch and then something terrible happens to posthaven).

garry5• 13 years ago

We'll write exporters the way Posterous did. Ideally we would work out some way where exporters wouldn't be necessary, e.g. the data appears in some perfect for elsewhere, intact, with the same URL.

joelrunyon4• 13 years ago

Well then. I'm sold. Thanks Garry.

joelrunyon4• 13 years ago

Just signed up - when is the service actually going live?

joelrunyon4• 13 years ago

One more question: when is the post by email function going to be live?

webology• 13 years ago

I think Garry is being pretty genuine here. I suspect some of the snark on this post stems from Posterous's overly aggressive marketing campaign from a few years back which started off here: http://blog.posterous.com/make-the-switch-to-posterous

spacemanaki• 13 years ago

Will Posthaven's importer retain the source of Markdown-based posts? The little bit of blogging I did using Posterous was almost all in Markdown, and when I found out that it wasn't possible to pull the original Markdown using the Posterous API I was pretty bummed out. (although in the end Pandoc did a mostly complete job converting it back) Maybe Posthaven has more access than Joe the API user? The source Markdown exists somewhere in their DB since you can go back and edit it on the site, but I couldn't find any way to get at it via the API. Frankly, if it doesn't retain it (understandable, given Posterous's API) I wouldn't call it 100% lossless.

This is one of the bigger reasons I'd be pretty wary of managed blogs again, although I guess I'm probably not the target audience for them since among the alternatives I'm thinking about is a few Emacs Lisp functions calling Org mode, which I admit is a little fringe.

jwmoz• 13 years ago

This is one of those things I know I need to do, but can't help thinking, 'oh ffs'.

SkyMarshal2• 13 years ago

I took this opportunity to download my Posterous posts, cull the signal, create an Octopress blog, and repost the non-culled posts there.

Was a PITA, took most of a weekend, but left me with a blog more under my control and composed of standardized markup. Don't think I'll be going the blog-as-a-service route again anytime soon.

My thanks and gratitude to @imathis, @mojombo, & co. for Octopress, along with everyone else making similar static site/blog generators.

SkyMarshal2• 13 years ago

er, cull the noise.

benatkin• 13 years ago

> Posthaven is the only place you can save your data safely.

This is false. You can also take the archive you downloaded from Posterous and save it to DropBox, and it will be on both DropBox and your computer's DropBox folder.

hamoid• 13 years ago

I created a Python migration tool for Wintersmith (nodejs based static blogging): https://github.com/hamoid/Posterous-to-Wintersmith Maybe the code can serve as an example for other migrations.

Posterous Migration Guide: All known importers compared

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