
Twitter-Owned Posterous Loses Databases, Offline for 2 Hours Plus - iProject
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/07/22/twitter-owned-posterous-loses-multiple-databases-service-down-for-2-hours/
======
nitrogen
I liked Posterous for its e-mail posting, connection to YC, and easy-ish theme
editor. Unfortunately, my experience has degraded significantly since I first
started blogging regularly on Posterous, with most of the degradation
occurring after the acquisition. For example, my embedded YouTube videos
demonstrating my Kinect-powered home automation system are no longer embedded
in my older blog posts! Modifying old posts isn't cool.

In addition to that, I get a 404 error when trying to manage the posts on my
"space," and elements of the web-based post editor are no longer working. Once
a post has been edited, it can take hours for it to show up on the blog's main
feed. Finally, Posterous pages load very slowly these days. I stopped
reporting bugs when I found that my reports were reaching an outsourced
customer interaction company rather than an actual Posterous team member.

I wish the Posterous founders well on their future work at Twitter, but
needless to say, I'm in the market for a new blog host.

~~~
nitrogen
[Too late to edit:] In fairness to Posterous, I should note that my embedded
YouTube videos were failing in Linux on both Chrome (no addons) and Firefox
(many addons), but seem to be working again in Firefox on Windows (also many
addons). So, it could have been a temporary issue related to their database
problems.

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simonw
I don't think tweeting that you've "lost a database" without any additional
context is a very good idea. I'm going to guess that they meant the database
was temporarily unavailable to their application servers, but it could easily
be interpreted to mean that they had suffered massive data loss with no
backups.

~~~
guiambros
Well, maybe that's _exactly_ what they meant...

~~~
simonw
That's still not something I'd tell my (potentially non-technical) users in a
tweet. Something like that deserves a LOT more context than 140 characters.

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kijin
Posterous was a great service until a couple of years ago. It was such a neat
idea: combine blogging with mailing lists. It was simple and easy.

Then they began to have multiple problems. Email notifications would fail to
arrive from time to time. Various over-ajaxed functions, including composing a
new post and various administrative pages, stopped working on one or another
browser. I had to use Chrome whenever I visited my family blog because things
would not render properly in Firefox. Then I had to go back to Firefox because
files wouldn't upload properly in Chrome. I suspect the problems had to do
with the introduction of the "Spaces" thing, which AFAIK never really took
off. I didn't even bother to complain because by that time, I'd stopped
Posterous for anything important anyway. Then they were acquired by Twitter,
and around the same time, most of the problems I'd been experiencing
mysteriously went away.

It's sad to see such a great service slowly killing itself. First they ruined
a perfectly working product by slapping half-baked social-networking bullshit
on it, and then they got acquired by a company that has little to do with
email blogging. On the plus side, they seem to have stopped developed "Spaces"
since the acquisition, which probably helped prevent the further introduction
of bullshit and unstable features.

~~~
justinkelly
i agree - loved posterous until they started the spaces thing

from there it went downhill, have exported by posterous blog into octopress -
and havent looked back

if there are any other posterous people looking to jump to octopress i've
setup <http://p.ostero.us> to make the move to markdown/hosted octopress
painless

cheers

justin \-- <http://p.ostero.us>

~~~
sathyabhat
Your site's down, Justin.

    
    
        Connection to 173.245.61.33 Failed The system returned: Connection timed out

~~~
justinkelly
prefect timing :( - coincided the unexpected outage of my site with the
posterous outage

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joelrunyon
Posterous seemed - like twitter - perfect because of it's simplicity. Email
meets blogging.

I think spaces made it sort of awkward and was disappointed that it
essentially stopped development since being acquired by twitter. I'm starting
to wish these acqui-hires were more focused on improving the product rather
than just getting the programming team to work on completely different
products.

------
azza-bazoo
I hope they publish a post-mortem when all is resolved, it'd be an interesting
read. I remember hearing that they had a fairly complex mix of MySQL, Riak,
and Varnish caching, in what sounded like a reasonably well-thought-out
design.

Also, there's probably a fail-whale joke in here somewhere :-)

------
BadassFractal
Oh no, I just hopped aboard the Posterous train a couple of weeks ago. Seems
like a lot of folks in this thread are recommending tumblr instead.

~~~
astrodust
Right, because Tumblr never goes down.

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aaronblohowiak
whats the best way to dump all my content ? I've looked at their json api but
was hoping someone has written an easy script to convert this to something
usable to replace my blog/personal page.

~~~
klaut
i imported all my posterous, other blogs stuff into jekyll:
<https://github.com/mojombo/jekyll/wiki/Blog-Migrations> (mind you, the
original posterous migration from jekyll does not work anymore, so you will
have to use this one
[https://github.com/pepijndevos/jekyll/blob/patch-1/lib/jekyl...](https://github.com/pepijndevos/jekyll/blob/patch-1/lib/jekyll/migrators/posterous.rb)
)

then with jekyll you can host your blog as github pages - this, to me, seems
like the best option to anything that is out there.

~~~
bhousel
I'm a big fan of octopress now, which is just jekyll with some rake tasks and
plugins already set up to make things even easier to get started..
<https://github.com/imathis/octopress>

