
Why and How I Migrated from Posterous to Self-Hosted WordPress - acangiano
http://blog.antoniocangiano.com/why-and-how-i-migrated-from-posterous-to-self-hosted-wordpress
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retube
I have to say I'm not really a fan of wordpress either. Granted I am not a
power user, in fact my knowledge of wordpress is crap, but that's partly
because it's always taken me so damn long to figure out how to do anything.

Yes there are millions of plugins, and millions of themes and if you really
now what you're doing it's a powerful CMS system that can look/feel how you
like. But I've always found doing simple things to be fiddly (more often than
not I've had to resort to hacking php), page response times are slow and
adding your own themes requires expertise. Which you got to do otherwise it
just looks like a theme, as polished as it might be.

What I really want to do is just write my own html from scratch. However then
you gotta use some kind of webapp framework to handle page components, provide
templating etc which has it's own overhead of course.

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acangiano
In that case, you may look into Octopress (mentioned in the post):
<http://octopress.org/>

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Tichy
Thanks so much! I was planning to switch to Jekyll, but was confused by the
apparent lack of a default template to get me started. Octopress seems to be
the missing piece.

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rdl
As a security aware person, wordpress self hosting is kind of terrifying. At
the very least, keep it on a dedicated VM and away from anything you care
about.

~~~
xorglorb
As another security interested person (who does not claim to be anything
remotely near an expert), my suggestion is to have a static site, generated
using something like Jekyll. Most blogs don't need server-side code running,
and Disqus works great for comments.

~~~
rdl
Absolutely. Some people like wordpress for irrational reasons, but Jekyll is
awesome (what I use).

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minikomi
Also see <http://rmurphey.com/blog/2011/07/25/switching-to-octopress>

Have to say, i also think Jekyll is a really nice compromise. Not something
you could recommend to a client though...

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websymphony
I did the same thing. Using octopress on github pages now.
<http://websymphony.net> Was earlier on Posterous. If you have decent
knowledge of html + css, you can have lot of flexibility in look and feel of
the blog. You also get to use Compass for managing css. Code highlighting is
pretty neat.

Default theme is quite readable, not like posterous low contrast themes. And
since it is hosted on github, you yourself don't have to worry about sudden
surge of traffic or security stuff.

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arikrak
Yes, I plan on doing the same thing with my blog (zappable.com). I didn't
really see the point in Posterous as a blogging platform, so I guess it makes
sense they're changing focus. However, there a re a couple of issues with a
self-hosted blog, such as expense, security and ability to handle traffic
spikes.

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Egregore
If you don't want anything fancy from wordpress, then running it securely is
very easy: there is an autoupdate button which will update it for you with one
click, the easier will be finding a hosted solution which will update
wordpress for you (sometimes it might not work if you customized it).

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brackin
Tumblr is more flexible in my opinion. There's something to Posterous which
makes it powerful for what tumblr was designed to do but Tumblr seems better
for longer form content.

Posterous = BYOC (Bring your own Community) Tumblr = BYOC + Utilize Tumblr's
user base and promotion tools.

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robertp
I setup a posterous years ago because it was the easiest way to share pics I
took from my phone. It worked on my blackberry and android devices when the
app markets were tiny. Now that wordpress has apps for all devices it is easy
to share and post via the app if I want to put up a sunset picture and have it
be tweeted out.

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revorad
Where are you hosting the blog now?

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acangiano
In the cloud with SoftLayer.

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staunch
"In the cloud" has come to mean "on the internet" nooooooo. God help us all
:-)

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acangiano
Haha. No, I actually meant a cloud instance and not a dedicated server.
SoftLayer offers both.

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kd1220
Why not use Amazon EC2? Their free tier (for a year) is more than sufficient
for hosting a blog. After the free period is over, you only end up paying
about $20/mo for a micro instance with 10GB of EBS.

Does SoftLayer offer anything more substantial than AWS?

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acangiano
I run a series of blogs and sites on the same instance. The micro-tier
wouldn't even remotely cut it. With SoftLayer I get 4 GB of RAM and it's
enough thanks to nginx and caching.

