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Posterous closing on April 30th to focus on Twitter
It's almost inevitable as breathing: a tech powerhouse acquires a clever yet small startup solely for its talent or technology, and lets any leftover services wither away. Posterous' decision to shut down following its 2012 acquisition by Twitter is very nearly a textbook example. The 4-year-old firm will close its Posterous Spaces service on April 30th to shift all of its attention to Twitter, giving customers just over two months to back up their content. There is an unusual twist to this seemingly predictable story, however. Those still using Spaces will have a place to go -- along with Squarespace and Wordpress import tools, Posterous founders Brett Gibson and Garry Tan are planning to launch Posthaven as a (not entirely intentional) refuge. Diehards will still have reason to mourn the end of an era, but the closure at least won't be the end to their creations.
Last Shot for iOS posts your most recent photo to social sites
Urban Apps' "The Last Shot" (free for a limited time) is an app that provides extremely narrow utility. The Last Shot posts your most recently-snapped picture to social networking sites. And that's about it. Fortunately, that functionality is both well thought out and convenient. The developers realized that the next step after "snap" is "share," and they built this tightly edited app to do exactly that. It offers a well-designed interface enabling you to select from a half dozen or so sites, and move your most recent picture from the camera roll to your friends, colleagues, and contacts through services like Facebook, Twitter, Posterous, Tumblr, and more. You launch the app, add a caption, choose destinations, and go. It's that simple. The app knows to grab the most-recent photo. The interface is clean and sparse. I found the entire app easy to use and on-point. I like how the Last Shot integrates into many services, offering one-stop sharing. If you regularly post to multiple sites, this might be the app for you. Will I personally be using it? I think I might, although I tend to rely on the photo-snapping built into my existing Twitter client for my current needs. I'm not a big cross-platform social user. For those who are, this app should be a treat. %Gallery-162270%
Twitter snatches up Posterous, microblogging field about to get a little bit smaller
The Y Combinator-funded Posterous had its time in the sun and now it's being absorbed by the biggest player in the microblogging market. The simple sharing service struck a chord with many of Silicon Valley's elite, but it never managed to make a major dent in a field already dominated by the likes of Tumblr and its now owner, Twitter. The teams from Posterous will simply shift over to products at its new parent company and let their creation die a slow and likely unspectacular death. There are no concrete plans to retire Posterous Spaces just yet but, should that day come, we've been promised plenty of warning and instructions for backing up your content. Now we'll just have to wait and see what "key initiatives" Twitter has in store for its new employees.
Blogging with your voice: Siri, Blogger, and post-by-SMS
As I mentioned on my earlier post, Steve Sande and I have been hard at work collaborating on "Talking to Siri," an ebook that will soon hit the Kindle store. One of the topics we're exploring is how to push Siri beyond its advertised limits. Take blogging, for example. Did you know that you could create blog posts entirely by voice? I'm not talking about basic dictation either. That's because Siri supports SMS messaging, and a little known feature of Google Blogger allows you to create blog posts directly from SMS text messages. [You can also use SMS to post to Tumblr and Posterous, although it's a bit more finicky. Services like ping.fm or HelloTXT may help if you plan to update several social networks right from Siri. –Ed.] Interested in giving it a spin? Send REGISTER to 256447. Blogger replies to your registration text by texting you a URL for your new blog and an optional claim code. This code can be used to associate your new access with an existing blog. It just as easy, however, to work with the automatically generated blog that is sent to you. To create a new post, just reply to the 256447 conversation. Dictate your new blog post to Siri and send it. Once you do, the text contents are instantly posted to the blog. If you want to start posts from scratch, just give that SMS number a memorable contact name in your address book (I used 'Geronimo Blogger' in the screenshot). You can visit the mobile blog I created this way over at Blogger and see the two posts I created using Siri. If you're on a limited SMS diet, posting by text message may prove too rich for your blood. There's still a Siri-capable workaround for that, but you must use an existing blogger account to create a Mail-to-Blogger address. You'll find a complete set of instructions at the Blogger help article on this subject. That write-up shows you how to use your account settings to establish your blogging email address, which consists of your user name and a secret word. You can then use Siri to send an email to that address whenever you want to post-by-voice. If you'd prefer not to use Blogger, there are plenty of other services that work with post-via-email. Tumblr, Posterous and Wordpress.com all support creating a custom address that you can use to post directly. Simply add the email to your address book with a distinctive yet pronounceable contact name ("Erica Tumblr" will work, but you might want to include a phonetic last name to help Siri suss out that it's pronounced 'tumbler'), then tell Siri "Send an email to Erica Tumblr." You can dictate your post and share it with the world.
Ten ways to replace iWeb and MobileMe hosting
Yesterday, we reported on a rumor that Apple's website creation software, iWeb, is about a year away from obsolescence, along with MobileMe's hosting of iWeb sites. An iWeb user allegedly sent Apple CEO Steve Jobs an email asking if he should start looking for another website builder and a new host, and Jobs provided one of his patented terse replies: "Yep." In my post about this, I mentioned some alternatives that TUAW readers might want to look at. Here I'm going to take a more detailed look at several easy website creation tools and hosting alternatives, so that you can start making your plans to move away from iWeb and MobileMe. I will not be covering professional web design tools in this post, as iWeb is designed for easy creation of sites. Instead, all of the suggestions I'll make here are aimed at the folks who just want to create a relatively good-looking website quickly, without a lot of training. iWeb hosting via FTP If you want to keep using iWeb for a while but would like to move your iWeb site away from MobileMe hosting, then get yourself a domain name, get a web host, and start publishing via FTP. iWeb 3 made it possible to publish your website on a traditional web host. You set up the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) settings in iWeb's site publishing settings, and pressing the Publish Site button takes care of uploading graphics, text, and any changed pages to the host. Just about every major and minor web hosting provider supports FTP. Note that some of the standard iWeb features, including password protection, blog and photo comments, blog search and the hit counter don't work when you use FTP for publishing. The great thing about this solution is that you can just change the host for your website, point iWeb to the new host, and publish your same old site to the new location. Not much is lost in translation, and you won't need to go through a lot of redesign work. Unfortunately, iWeb probably won't be supported in the future and may eventually stop working with future releases of Mac OS X. The other negative? You'll need to pay for web hosting from one of the many hosting providers. You can also use your own Mac as a web server (no matter how old), but that's the subject of another post... iWeb hosting on Dropbox If you have a lightly-used iWeb site and don't feel like spending money on web hosting, consider getting a free Dropbox account and hosting your iWeb site there. I wrote some instructions on how to use Dropbox as your iWeb host a while back, so check them out. Advantages? You can continue using iWeb for a while longer. Disadvantages? Dropbox isn't designed for large-traffic web hosting, and might shut you down if your site is wildly popular. Likewise, if you have a huge and complex iWeb site with a lot of photos, you might go over the free 2 GB free storage limit and have to start paying for web hosting. Facebook Do you just want to have a "site" where you can post pictures and videos, let your friends know what you're doing, and get comments on your content? Then you may just want to move over to Facebook. It's free, and most of your friends and relatives are probably already using it. Facebook is fine for the new material you create, but how do you move your old posts to the land of Zuckerberg? It's probably not going to work very well. I can envision some sort of long session involving copying and pasting text to Facebook, but with the constantly changing wall of content on Facebook, your old content is going to be wiped off the wall fairly soon. If you have a lot of your iPhoto pics on your iWeb site, then you're in luck. Just open up iPhoto, put all of those iPhoto pics into an album, and then use Share > Facebook to move the photos into a Facebook album. What if you're looking for a more personal and unique site? That's where my next suggestions come in. WordPress / WordPress.com When I want to put a website or blog together quickly, I use WordPress. This blogging tool (content management system) has been around for years, and it is wildly popular. Over 14% of the top 1 million websites were created in WordPress, and the most recent major release of WordPress had been downloaded over 32.5 million times by February of 2011. There's even a professional version, WordPress VIP, which our sister site TechCrunch uses as its underlying CMS. WordPress is not a Mac application; rather, it is an AMP (Apache / MySQL / PHP) application that runs on a server (or on your Mac). You log into a dashboard from your favorite web browser, add content, change the look and feel of the site with themes and plugins, and then publish your changes. There's no need, as in iWeb, to make changes locally and then wait for your modifications to be uploaded to a server. For beginning WordPress bloggers, I recommend a free WordPress.com account. It's a great way to learn how WordPress works, all your content can be migrated to another WordPress host at a later date if necessary, and the fairly new step-by-step tutorials are an incredible way to learn all about this powerful content management system. If you decide to head out on your own, most major web hosting providers have one-click installers for WordPress. In other words, you sign up for a hosting plan, then say that you want WordPress installed. A few minutes later, you get an email from your WordPress site saying that you need to log in and create an administrative account. Do that, and you're on your way to blogging superstardom. Among the hosting providers that provide one-click installations of WordPress are Bluehost, DreamHost, MediaTemple, and GoDaddy. Note that you're going to have to pay for a hosting plan, so maybe the $99 you'll be saving every year by not renewing MobileMe will pay for your web hosting. WordPress is remarkably powerful, and a vast developer community is constantly creating new plugins to add functionality to the tool and designing new themes to make pages that are unique and beautiful. If you can't find a theme to your liking, there's always Artisteer, an app that you can use to easily create your own custom theme. iWeb users who might have set up a small shop using something like Google Checkout or PayPal buttons can actually get a real web commerce site going with WordPress. There are several plugins now available for WordPress that integrate with shopping cart services like FoxyCart. Finally, WordPress is an excellent way to get familiar with most content management systems. For anyone who has aspirations to become a professional blogger, starting with WordPress can get you familiar with the tools and workflow that you'll need to move on up the ladder. Tumblr Want a very easy to use and free way to host a website? Tumblr's a good start. You can sign up for free in minutes and be posting immediately after that. There's a selection of Tumblr themes -- none of which I found to my liking -- that you can choose from, and all you need to do to post is have a web browser or use an iOS app like Tumblr (Free) or QuickTumblr ($2.99, for iPad). As you can see from the Tumblr dashboard screenshot above, once you've logged into your account you have a choice of what you can post. Each one of these buttons leads to a data entry page that you can use to post a specific type of content. On Tumblr, you can create some social engagement by choosing other tumblelogs to follow, or by liking/favoriting posts which you can quote or reblog on your own site. Tumblr's bookmarklet and email posting tools are pretty snazzy, and they make it easy to clip and share popular links or videos. You can call in posts from your cellphone, if you like blogging in audio format. We even have a TUAW Tumblr for material that might not be suitable for the main site. I personally don't like the vibe or feel of Tumblr, which is why I use the next tool for some personal posting. Posterous The only thing you need to start a Posterous blog is an email account. Why? Because you can actually do a lot of your posting by just sending emails to a special Posterous address. You can also use the web-based editor with Safari, Firefox, Chrome, or any other modern web browser to update your information. Posterous is completely free, and there's also a free iPhone app for posting on the run. I've been using Posterous on and off for three years for my personal blog, and I really like it. There are some great themes -- the current one I'm using uses a grid of fifteen photos to show the last fifteen posts, and it works very well on an iPad. Speaking of the iPad, I recently found out that I can use the handy Writing Kit app ($4.99) to write posts in Markdown and then email 'em to Posterous for publishing. It also has some of the same posting options as Tumblr, and it offers a Groups feature for collaboration & sharing among friends or family. [Since it's graduation season, don't miss the Posterous "instant collaborative photo album" trick, which leverages the geolocation features of the Posterous iPhone app to cluster pictures around an event. So slick. –Ed.] As far as I'm concerned, Posterous is the best for free hosting of personal websites. It's incredibly flexible, drop-dead simple to use (I mean, how hard is it to send an email?), it has links to and from the social networking world, offers great looking themes, supports your own private domain names, and never seems to have any downtime. However, for small business sites, which are one of the other main uses for iWeb and MobileMe hosting, it's really not appropriate. Squarespace Businesses looking for a way to make beautiful sites with associated hosting should take a peek at Squarespace. This is a combination of a typographically-friendly web-based design tool and hosting that produces some great-looking sites. As with MobileMe hosting, you can have Squarespace host your own domain, and the hosting prices are relatively low -- $144 to $432 per year depending on how popular your site is, how many editors you want, and how many big business features you need. As with WordPress, Squarespace is easily integrated with shopping cart services. And when you see small business sites like this or this, you can see how professional and compelling Squarespace websites can be. Drupal / Drupal Gardens WordPress probably powers more websites and blogs than any other content management system, but Drupal is another hugely popular tool. It's an open source system like WordPress, meaning that the software is written and supported by a community, and the base files are free for the copying. Drupal powers the websites for The Economist, Examiner.com, and even the White House, so you can see that it's a professional system. For those who are making the move from iWeb and MobileMe hosting, Drupal Gardens might be a good place to start. It's a hosted system similar to WordPress.com and offers a lot of the power of Drupal 7. It's free for low-bandwidth use, with paid subscriptions for more users, more traffic, and support. Drupal sites can be extremely idiosyncratic in style, and the content management system has built-in features like forums, polls, galleries, and more. The free account is a great way to get your feet wet in the ocean of Drupal, and you can then either move to a paid subscription or put a Drupal installation on another host and move your content. RapidWeaver I've talked a lot about web-based blogging tools here, but what about easy Mac-based website tools? RapidWeaver ($59.99) from Realmac Software is a favorite of a lot of Mac users. In many ways, RapidWeaver is similar to iWeb. You create a site using a template, add pages, drop in addons (like widgets in iWeb), and then publish your site. While you're working on your content, you can toggle between an editing mode and a view of the site as it will look when it's published -- that's helpful for making sure that there are no surprises when the publish button is pushed. If you use RapidWeaver, you'll need to have a web hosting provider. The app supports FTP publishing, so just about any web hosting provider will be able to accommodate your site. Realmac has a store for RapidWeaver themes, plug-ins, and another feature called Stacks. Themes define the look and feel of the site, plug-ins provide extended capabilities like forms or ecommerce, and stacks are another way of including features that are not built into the basic app. There's a free trial available from RealMac before you buy RapidWeaver from the Mac App Store or direct from the company. Sandvox Another venerable web creation app for Mac is Sandvox 2 ($77) from Karelia Software. For a website creation and publishing experience that is close to that of iWeb, but with a lot more features and flexibility, Sandvox is probably the way to go. Even the user interface for Sandvox looks a lot like iWeb. As with both iWeb and RapidWeaver, there are a variety of themes included, many of which come in more than one choice of color. Unlike with iWeb, you can edit the raw HTML of your website and even run it through the W3C Markup Validation Service from within the app. Sandvox includes a long list of objects (essentially the same as iWeb widgets or RapidWeaver plug-ins). Things like Amazon lists (for use with an Amazon Associates account), a built-in Facebook "Like" button, Flickr thumbnails, or a built-in Twitter feed are easy to drag right into a Sandvox page. Once again, you'll need to get web hosting from any of the many providers out there. Sandvox supports publishing not only through FTP and SFTP, but WebDAV as well. You can download the app for a free trial and see if Sandvox is for you. Conclusion These are just ten of the possible web creation and hosting solutions that iWeb users have available to them. If you're currently hosting an iWeb site on MobileMe, it's a perfect time to start thinking about what you'll do in the post-MobileMe world. Whether you choose to continue using iWeb for a while and just host your site elsewhere, or decide to go with another tool or a web-based content management system, there's no better time to begin planning your website redesign or move. Keep in mind, though, before you tear up every bit of your carefully crafted iWeb workflow: it is still June of 2011, and there will be a full year before the MobileMe servers go dark in June of 2012. It's likely that we'll be hearing something more from Apple with regard to iWeb site migration around the time of the iCloud launch later this year. After all, as Fortune points out, this isn't the first time that an Apple web publishing tool has been kicked to the curb -- .Mac HomePage got the boot in July of 2009. I did not include professional-level tools like Adobe Dreamweaver in this list, since we wanted to show tools that anyone who is well-versed in the use of iWeb could easily use. If you favor other easy-to-use web creation and publishing tools, let us know in the comments.
Rumor: Steve Jobs says iWeb and MobileMe hosting are going away
Those of us with a vested interest in iWeb have been perplexed by the lack of interest shown by Apple in the former iLife web design app. Couple this with the pending demise of MobileMe on June 30, 2012, and that confusion turns into concern. MacRumors featured a post a few hours ago about an iWeb/MobileMe fan who was so concerned about the lack of iWeb love coming from Apple that the user sent Steve Jobs an email. In the email the iWeb user asked, "Will I need to find an alternative website builder and someone to host my sites?" The alleged response from the CEO of Apple: "Yep." iWeb's discontinuation wouldn't be completely surprising. When iLife '11 debuted late last year, the lack of a new version of iWeb frustrated a number of users. When iCloud was announced last week, there was no indication that websites created with iWeb and hosted on MobileMe would have a migration path to the new world of Apple cloud computing. There are many free website alternatives to a MobileMe-hosted iWeb site, such as WordPress.com, Blogger, Tumblr, and Posterous; paid options include Squarespace, Drupal Gardens and hundreds more. In addition, Facebook is an excellent alternative for both individuals or companies who just want to create a simple web presence to inform friends or customers of what's going on. If your needs are for a straightforward yet powerful WYSIWIG web authoring environment, both RapidWeaver and Sandvox deliver much of iWeb's power with more flexibility for non-MobileMe hosting. For those who still want to have their websites designed in iWeb and hosted somewhere other than on MobileMe, you might want to start looking for low-cost web hosting soon.
Posterous for iPhone puts microblogging power at your fingers
Arguably, one of the easiest ways to publish online is with Posterous. Creating and updating a weblog with Posterous is as simple as sending an email. Now, the gang has created another tool for users to play with: Posterous for iPhone (free). I've been using the app for a couple of weeks now. I also had a chat with Posterous CEO and co-founder Sachin Agarwal. Here's our review of the app and highlights of my discussion with Sachin. On Posterous First, a bit about the service itself. To create a Posterous blog, all you need to do is send an email message to post@posterous.com. That's it. A site will be created for you with your email's subject as the first post's title and the body as the post itself. There's nothing to configure, install or set up. Likewise, creating a photo gallery is just as easy. Send your pictures to the same address (using the email address you initially chose) and Posterous does the rest, creating a gallery, thumbnails and so on. %Gallery-106840%
Pulse News Reader for iPad update makes you a news editor
A new update to Pulse News Reader for iPad now lets you mash up your own mix of news for others to subscribe to. The update to version 1.1.4, which went live last evening, provides each user with their own "pulse" if they so desire. What's a pulse? It's actually a Posterous blog (with a pulsememe.com domain name). If you're looking through some of your feeds in Pulse News Reader and see a post that you'd like your friends or followers to read, just tap on the "heart" icon and the post is added to your pulse. Followers can subscribe to your pulse in Pulse News Reader for iPad by searching for your name or handle in the app, then searching under Pulse Users. For example, if anyone wants to see what news I'm excited about, they can subscribe to Steve Sande. Whether it's a news item I've added from another site or something that I've written and posted to my Pulsememe blog, it gets published and the world gets to read it. If friends or followers aren't Pulse users, they can still follow what I'm interested in by going to the blog that's created at stevesande.pulsememe.com. Now here's the cool thing. If a lot of people are tapping the heart icon for a specific post, it ends up on the top stories page at Pulsememe.com. People who add a lot of posts are considered top editors and are listed on the Pulsememe page. In other words, this becomes a way for hot news items on the blogs you follow to rise to the top of the Internet heap, at least for a while. If there's anything I'm not happy about, it's that I can't connect this to my existing Posterous blog -- it ends up going into the special Pulsememe blog instead. The update is free to current users of Pulse News Reader for iPad, and the My Pulse feature should be making it to the iPhone version soon. Take a look at the gallery below for a few screenshots. %Gallery-98785%
Make your personal iPhone app in just 10 minutes
Have you ever secretly wished that you could have your own personal iPhone app? An app that you could give to friends, relatives, and your adoring fans? Now you can have your own iPhone (or Android, if you swing that way) app featuring all of your personal feeds from sources such as Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Posterous, Tumblr, and more. The really cool thing is that it's not going to take you much time, nor will you need to learn how to program. Through a new service called iSites, you can take all of your life feeds and have an iPhone app created just for you. The cost? Only US$25. If you think that your hordes of faithful followers are going to download and use the app, you can spend another $99 to integrate AdMob ads into your personal app, meaning that you might be able to become rich (you're already famous, right?) beyond your wildest dreams by giving away your app in the App Store. Everything about the iSites app you create is customizable; the feeds that make up the content (see photo above), the colors, even your icon and store banner. Anyone using your app can easily share an article with others via Twitter, Facebook, or email, and the app has support for video, image thumbnails, and the ability to mark a post as a favorite. I'm not sure that I'm ready to bore the world with my personal iPhone app, but when I finally get to that point, I'll probably use iSites to create it. [via Mashable]
Quick and easy podcasting with an iPhone 3GS, GarageBand, and Posterous
I love podcasting. My first podcasts weren't really podcasts, just recordings that I made and uploaded to a website in the late 90's so that other people could listen to them. Unlike the podcasts we know and love today, there was no way to subscribe to all of the episodes that I recorded. When podcasting as we know it hit the world in 2004, I started hosting podcasts through one of my companies. Despite creating two long-running podcasts between 2004 and 2007, I finally gave up because of the time involved. Part of the problem was due to me being a stickler for perfection in my podcasts, while the rest was due to the fact that I was stuck with podcasting when I was near my iMac and could edit and update a feed file on a regular basis. Earlier this month, I decided that I wanted to start up a personal podcast again. Yeah, I talk about tech, but for the most part I wanted this to be a free-form podcast that could talk about photography one day, music the next, and the joys of being a cat owner the third. Since my calendar is already pretty well jammed, the only way I was going to be able to commit to doing a podcast every day was to get the podcast workflow down to as little time as possible.
PicPosterous for the iPhone is nearly perfect
I've spent the last few weeks with Posterous, a blogging platform from Sachin Agarwal and Garry Tan. The result is both a modest record of my travels and a powerful enthusiasm for the service. Posterous is going to be huge. Even Andy says so. Over the years, I've used every blogging platform I've found, including (but not limited to) WordPress, Typepad, MovableType, Squarespace, Vox, Livejournal, Blogger and Textpattern. The easiest among those are the hosted solutions, like Typepad, Livejournal, Blogger, Squarespace and Vox (note that Typepad, Livejournal and Vox are all products of Six Apart). WordPress and MovableType are (usually) self-hosted and require the blogger* to create and link to a database. After installation is complete, they all require some degree of fiddling. Customizing the layout, design, colors, graphics etc. takes time. Adding something like an image gallery is even more time consuming, and often requires a plug-in which you must find, upload, configure and test on your own. By contrast, here's how you create a complete blog with Posterous: Send an email message to post@posterous.com. That's it. Here's how you create a full-featured, thumbnailed photo gallery with built-in navigation on Posterous: Email your photos to post@posterous.com. Want to post a video? Same thing. It'll even encode it for you. Send nearly any codec you want. It's brilliant because there's nothing to learn. Everyone knows how to send an email message and customers can use the email client they already know; the client that's always available via a laptop, phone or iPod. Additionally, Posterous can notify your other accounts, like Facebook and Twitter, each time an update is posted. The only drawback I found was in updating a gallery throughout the day. Let's say I want to document a trip with multiple photos added to a single post as the day progressed. How can I do that? PicPosterous [App Store link] is the answer. I spent the last couple of weeks using a beta of PicPosterous and spoke with Sachin about it. Click below to read my reaction and conversation with Sachin. %Gallery-70824% *Some web hosting companies provide a one-click install for WordPress and MovableType. Wordpress.com also provides free and premium plans for WordPress users.
