

Posterous and URLs - robotadam
http://mtrichardson.com/2010/06/posterous-and-urls/

======
a4agarwal
1\. I hope we add this soon

2\. I'm going to take my chances among the HN community and say: I think this
is low priority because

i. Most other services don't even offer import. Posterous offers import from
(soon to be) 15+ services. this is not easy

ii. Posterous supports all different post/media types so that we can import
from so many different services. We put our focus here

iii. I care about sharing with my family and friends. They don't care about
permanent URLs as much as being able to find my site and search for what they
want. cc/google

If you are a pro blogger (and maybe you are), and you have major google juice
on some URLs, then yes, maybe you care about this. But most people aren't, and
don't.

There are many reasons why someone should or shouldn't move between competing
services on the internet. But urls seems like a very small reason to make that
decision. Future services (Posterous or maybe others!) might offer super
compelling reasons to move.

Not moving because of urls seems like not switching to a Mac because you have
all the Windows keyboard shortcuts memorized.

In my lifetime, I expect to move between blogging platforms, phone providers,
desktop OSs. I will buy different brands of cars, live in different
neighborhoods, probably even switch email providers.

Yes, there are switching costs. But we hope to minimize them. And more
importantly, we hope to focus on adding awesome features so you are willing to
incur that switching cost.

~~~
jeff18
> Not moving because of urls seems like not switching to a Mac because you
> have all the Windows keyboard shortcuts memorized.

In the spirit of the recent "raw unsolicited advice" to Posterous trend, here
are my thoughts: I was impressed when you guys responded saying you were going
to add this feature soon. However, playing it down with car, phone, and
operating system analogies feels sort of patronizing and makes me worry that
you guys might not understand the full scope of the issue:

a) You will lose all of your page rank

b) Anyone who has linked to you (including yourself) will have a broken link

Sure, for some number of users this doesn't matter. For the people who care
about it, it is, by definition, very important. What's the point of trying to
play down their concern?

------
pablohoffman
I also find annoying that Posterous, for some reason, appends numeric suffixes
arbitrarily to certain post slugs (for example:
<http://blog.pablohoffman.com/hi-posterous-58>). It's like they have to make
the post slug "globally unique", instead of "unique per blog", although they
shouldn't have to.

It wouldn't be that bad if you could change the slug/url but, as the article
correctly points out, you can't.

~~~
jrnkntl
This is indeed a namespace thing, every posterous blog uses the same global
namespace. They said this will be changed.

See <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1443020>

~~~
ydant
There are little quirks in the service that make it seem pretty obvious the
(first) custom sub-domains and then (later) custom domains were added on
later. The namespace issue seems downright silly until you remember that fact.

Now that every blog is on its own subdomain at the least, I'd imagine this
could be cleaned up - hopefully with the ability for custom URLs at the same
time...

------
fookyong
This is one of those "mom do I haaaaave to????" pieces of functionality that
engineers (I say this as an engineer-type) hate.

I would procrastinate for weeks before implementing something like this. It's
boring, complex, and affects a tiny minority of users.

However to engineers like me, we have to remember that even though the number
of end-users might be small, in this case they are inherently more valuable
than the average user. They bring a cache of readers with them and if they
like the user experience, can potentially evangelize the product for you more
effectively than someone starting a blog from scratch can.

~~~
danieldon
As an engineer, I don't think preserving URLs is a minor issue.

~~~
jackowayed
He never said it was. He said that it affects a small number of users (because
most of Posterous users are starting fresh, not moving from a blog that they
actually care about) and that it's complex.

~~~
jeff18
> most of Posterous users are starting fresh

Posterous heavily promotes migrating your blog from other services.

------
rantfoil
This is great feedback. We hope to get this in soon. Thanks very much for the
support and suggestions.

------
jeff18
That would be really interesting if Tumblr and other sites create a posterous
importer and everyone is a good 302 redirect citizen. Then you could switch to
any service at any point, seamlessly.

~~~
Tichy
It's called DNS.

------
ydant
Agreed. That and dates in URLs (or at least search by date) would be handy. I
just migrated a blog over and ran into the same issue. In my case, I was ok
with changing domains as well, so I set up a load of redirects on the old one
to the new one. It's not a perfect solution and it missed some, but it'll work
for now.

------
JoachimSchipper
For the purposes of linking, you could just redirect appropriately from
<yourdomain> to www.<yourdomain> or the other way round...

------
jeb
Just setup htaccess on your original server to redirect to the new URLs. If
you care so much about google juice, then you can spend a day doing this,
instead of requiring posterous to solve the problem for you.

~~~
fookyong
how?

DNS will resolve to posterous' servers. It's out of your old server's control
by that point.

Unless you're talking about different domains, e.g. moving from

mycoolblog.com self hosted -> myawesomeblog.com on posterous

in that case you could do what you said, but I don't think that's what the OP
is talking about. the issue is when you use the same domain on both.

------
petervandijck
yea amen to that

------
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