From the category archives:

Technology

Posterous vs. WordPress

July 13, 2009

As most of you probably know, I’m a big fan of WordPress, what with being the lead organizer for WordCamp Portland and having founded the Portland WordPress User Group and all. That said, Posterous has been making a lot of waves lately with Steve Rubel now using it for all of his publishing and even Chris Brogan giving it a shot. I decided to use Posterous to blog our recent roadtrip, publishing text and photos from the road.

The big differentiator between Posterous and a traditional blog platform like WordPress is that all content is published via email. Sending text to Posterous creates a text post. Including a photo or video attachment results in those being shown on the post. If multiple photos are attached, a gallery is created. Posterous’ other notable feature is that it can then notify other social networks of your content. Photos can be sent to Flickr or Facebook. Links to the Posterous post can be published to Twitter or a Facebook news feed. Videos can be sent to YouTube, Vimeo, or the like.

My overall impression was that post-by-email was a great solution for moblogging from a smartphone, but the limitations of the service mean that I wouldn’t consider it for any sort of permanent blog/web presence. The look/feel can’t be customized, and my of the “nice to haves” of a full blog platform (Gravatar, OpenID support, threaded comments, etc.) are missing. I know that Posterous is under development and I’d expect to see these type of features in the future, but for now I don’t think it can be seen as anything more than a plumbing system to mass-publish content across the web.

As such a plumbing system, it works great. I had no problems using their email interface to specify if I wanted my content to go everywhere (in my case Posterous, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook) or just to a subset of the services. One gotcha that I ran into was that because I have my Facebook feed setup to import from Flickr, when I posted a photo to both Flickr and Facebook it showed up twice on Facebook. This isn’t a fault of Posterous at all, but rather me needing to be more granular in my cross posting. The one Posterous-to-Facebook annoyance that is a limitation is that when posts are made with photos on Posterous, the photos get put into a Facebook album and the blog post gets pushed to the Facebook news feed, but there’s no connection.

Overall Posterous worked great for pushing a variety of content to a variety of places. The rather spartan web interface, lack of customization, and lack of extensibility limits its usefulness for a more traditional blog or website presence. A lot of Posterous’ functionality could be duplicated via WordPress plugins. For a simple publishing mechanism, Posterous is great, but for a full-featured blog platform, WordPress remains king.

{ 9 comments }

OpenID Delegation Makes Vidoop’s Failure Painless*

May 30, 2009

I asterisked the word “painless” in the title of this post since Vidoop’s downfall certainly isn’t painless for its employees, many of whom I call friends. But as an OpenID user taking advantage of delegation, the process of switching providers is fairly straightforward.

The quick backstory for those of you wondering What Is OpenID Delegation: Delegation allows one to use a URL that is not an OpenID provider as their claimed OpenID URL. A bit of code that is embedded in the headers of that URL contains redirection code so that OpenID requests are sent to the actual OpenID provider.

In my case, I’d been using Vidoop’s MyVidoop product as my OpenID provider. I added code to the header section of http://www.aaronhockley.com so that I could give that out as my OpenID URL. When I made an OpenID claim using that URL, the code would redirect the request to Vidoop, where I would authenticate, and be redirected back to the relying party. The sites that use OpenID record my aaronhockley.com address, but I authenticated using Vidoop’s secure system.

With Vidoop about to disappear, I needed a new OpenID provider. I chose VeriSign’s PIP system due to their support for two-factor authentication. After signing up for PIP, I updated the code on aaronhockley.com to point to VeriSign’s servers, and that’s the end of the story. I can continue to use aaronhockley.com as my OpenID URL even though my provider has changed, and all of my accounts across the web that are linked to that URL will still work without any disruption in service.

{ 3 comments }

Does this Make Me a Mac?

May 11, 2009

On Saturday, I bought a Mac*. I’m a switcher.

Folks have asked: “Why?” There are a number of reasons, some major, some minor, but all leading me to think that my life will be smoother once I’ve converted over to OS X. As a photographer, it makes sense. Much of the world of photo software revolves around the Mac. Having looked at Windows 7, Microsoft has made some nice updates for networks and corporations, but I didn’t see too much there that would really benefit me as a one-man photography shop. When I look at software innovations and I look at new tools being released, more often than not these tools seem to be arriving on OS X.

I’m still getting things set up and need to start the heavy migration of my photos and Lighroom catalog along with some other random data that I store locally. Twitter has a been a great migration resource… with so many of my tweeps being Mac users, I can throw out questions looking for software recommendations or wondering about hardware and I get back a bunch of useful information from people I trust.

What else should I know? What random bits of Mac or OS X coolness do you want to share with me as a comment?

* I bought the MacBook Pro, 15″, 4GB RAM, 512mb video. It’s this one.

{ 11 comments }

Observations on Twitter, Noise, Filters, Spam, and Value

April 8, 2009

This video contains a lot of thoughts on Twitter and the value of Twitter… lately things have seemed really noisy, with a lot of content that I may not want to see, some spam thrown in for good measure, and some otherwise tech-savvy folks who engage in what I feel are questionable Twitter practices. I talk about the value in one’s Twitter stream along with particular behaviors which degrade the value, wrapping things up with some solutions (both technical and behavioral) that I feel will increase the value of Twitter for individuals. The video is a bit long (a little over 13 minutes) but I’m hoping folks will watch and comment. Let’s increase the value of microblogging for everyone!

http://www.vimeo.com/4072408

{ 7 comments }

← Previous Entries