

Posterous releases blog themes - Sam_Odio
http://blog.posterous.com/posterous-theming-its-here-its-live-and-its-t

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byrneseyeview
Microblogs have a very interesting hype cycle: first they drop all the
features that normal blogs have accumulated over the last ten years.

Then, one at a time, and to great fanfare, they add them back.

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rantfoil
We've never claimed to be a microblog. This has been on the roadmap from the
beginning. It's very simple: we listen to users and implement features to
delight them and make the service more valuable for them.

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byrneseyeview
I am definitely glad to see the feature added -- I just think the amount of
attention it gets is a little excessive.

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thorax
I've been waiting for it from day one. It literally changes my plans for my
blog. My wife loved the backend but hated the front-end looks. It's a big deal
to some of us.

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unalone
_literally changes_

What would a nonliteral change be?

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thorax
So, umm, why isn't this a pay feature? I would have paid.

 _Added_ : In fact, I do pay monthly for squarespace which you've now got
enough theme parity with (at least through the advanced editor) that a geek
like me would pay happily.

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fallentimes
You're the minority.

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teej
This would have been a great opportunity for Posterous to gather data to test
their hypothesis. It's obvious that there are passionate people on both ends
of the spectrum.

Would people actually -pay- for themes? Why not show some users a link to a
"Premium Themes" option and see how far down the funnel they go? If the
numbers work out, launch themes as a pay option. It's always easier to go from
paid -> free than the other way around.

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pclark
Finally. Seriously, I've been waiting literally months for this. So long I
switched to tumblr in the end, sadly...

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pclark
just noticed it supports _tumblr_ themes. how clever is that? A+

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unalone
That's brilliant. It would make converting much easier. Now if only it had
Tumblr's social features...

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felideon
I was wondering how dcurtis was doing it. This is great news. Just in time for
me to start a blog.

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TrevorJ
Could you expand on that comment somewhat? Does <http://dustincurtis.com> make
use of posterious somehow?

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judofyr
<http://blog.dustincurtis.com/> uses Posterous.

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TrevorJ
Ah, thank you. I would love to know how he approaches creating his other
website and how he creates his graphics. I love is style.

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kineticac
The huge response Posterous gets from their fans for every micro feature they
release is because they already have a fan base. The more community or users
you have who depend on your service, the more they want a feature. If you
start off with an empty blog platform with every feature wordpress has, nobody
really cares. OR, if you start off with one really distinguishing feature
(Post by Email) and you instantly gain a huge user base who like that, they
wait in anticipation for all the small features you can find elsewhere.

Posterous has an awesome foundation to build off of, and because of that they
have a real advantage. They can get feedback from a lot of users, including
requests for features. What to build? That is easily solved just by listening
to what people have to say. They can validate features to build, and are
justified in their time by the constant requests for these features.

As soon as they release a feature, they know it's going to be big since the
community has been asking. And when it's there, the community feels that they
were just given what they've been wanting. Nobody blames them for not having
it in the first place, knowing this is a growing app, and are glad to be early
adopters.

These guys (garry and sachin) are in a great position, and it's nearly
impossible for them to NOT build a great product with all the feedback they
are getting.

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judofyr
_Javascript is not enabled on Posterous pages for security reasons. We'll be
introducing ways you can add your own javascript widgets soon._

I wonder how good their protection is…

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axod
I can't find it at the moment, but there's a very cool javascript sandbox
system at Google Code somewhere.

I believe it creates an iframe with a separate domain, writes the js into it,
and communicates via message passing/anchor etc.

The net result is that you can execute unsafe js, in a sandbox on your page
and expose an API to it.

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aristus
<http://code.google.com/p/google-caja/>

It's not an iframe, it's a capability-based filter which provides more
security than an iframe can. A lot of sites use it now that it's reasonably
fast...

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vibhavs
While I understand _why_ they had to introduce theming, I'm worried about the
simplicity that I have come to love in Posterous. I just hope Posterous blogs
don't become the next MySpace pages.

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apgwoz
Judging by the mostly sane tumblr pages, this won't be an issue.

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JustRick
Interestingly, it seems that if you remove the Posterous branding box from the
theme template, it still gets added back in during page rendering.

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simanyay
I wish they had JavaScript support in themes.

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calvin
XSS support isn't a feature.

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simanyay
Both Tumblr and Blogger support JavaScript and they're doing just fine.

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saurabh
I can now use my posterous blog as OpenID

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JulianMorrison
I'll stick with the minimalist default.

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zeynel1
I think they should give the chance to choose a name for the url instead of
just using the email.

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ajdecon
You can do that: post@whatever.posterous.com

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zeynel1
Thanks. I wanted to create a blog with name "1-world" but I got an email
saying that

"We were unable to post your email:

create a blog to site: 1-world.posterous.com because this site does not
exist."

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zeynel1
I see that they let you choose the custom url after you create the blog.

