Goodbye Posterous, Hello WordPress

I've been a Posterous user for over 3 years, having used them to host all my sparsely updated blogs. It came as a bit of a surprise this week when their founder Sachin Agarwal announced that the company had been bought by Twitter. From the press releases, the acquisition appears to be more about buying the people rather than the product. All good for the Posterous staff I think, I'm pleased for them if it works out. However, where does it leave the users? This particular statement on the announcement makes me think that all development on the current Posterous Spaces platform will stop and will eventually get killed off.

Posterous Spaces will remain up and running without disruption. We’ll give users ample notice if we make any changes to the service. For users who would like to back up their content or move to another service, we’ll share clear instructions for doing so in the coming weeks.

A company actively encouraging users to backup and find another service is a sure sign this thing isn't going to be around for much longer.

As it turns out, this was fairly good timing for me. I'd been considering moving blogging platforms for a while, but with no immediate need to do so, I'd put it off. This announcement gave me the push required.

While I've been a fan of Posterous, I've also been frustrated by its lack of flexibility. In addition, I also wanted more control over my data, I wanted to own it rather than have it in the hands of someone else. This has been an issue for me with many services over the past couple of years. For example, the proprietary format of notes in Evernote led me to start using Simplenote and Notational Velocity, for the simple reason that I can move my data elsewhere if required. So when it came to choosing a new blogging platform, the key thing was self-hosting. The natural choice was WordPress, it being so ubiquitous and easy to install. Using this guide by SQL Server guru Brent Ozar, I was up and running in no time.

I've consolidated both my personal and SQL Server blogs into one, all the SQL content can be found here. Now I just need to get back to writing again…but this will probably have to wait till I finish my Creative Writing Open University course in the summer. My words are at a premium!