Chris’ posterous

For a while this worked well but I soon came to realize that Blogger was limiting me in terms of layout, plugins and "owning" my own data. So I moved the main blog to WordPress and hosted the site at Laughing Squid (a decision I am very happy with). I have full control over my blog now, I love my hosting company, and was able to settle on a clean theme for web display as well as WPTouch for display on the iPhone.

Since my blog is self hosted on my own domain, I wanted to make sure that anything I wrote, captured or re-blogged would be there at cjsparno.com. This would create a brand (not so much for monetizing my content, but for getting all my stuff under one name). This created a bit of a challenge in that FriendFeed was also a place to store larger content and now I had two parallels conversations going on with my readers, one that I owned and another that become difficult to manage. Plus, I was re-broadcasting to Twitter and then later Facebook, creating some double posts due to the way FriendFeed was re-broadcasting content posted to Facebook and to Twitter.

So, even early on I realized that most of the time I would be creating a mix of original content and re-blogs, and I would want it in a permanent place that I owned (my own domain). I also wanted that content announced on Twitter when I created it, and grabbed by FriendFeed to take advantage of its excellent commenting capability.

At about this time (about 2 months ago), a friend, Kris Colvin, got me interested in Tumblr based on the work she had done with it. I really liked the way I could create a lifestream with Tumblr and also loved the bookmarklet that let me grab "stuff" while surfing. But once again, I lost control of the "entry point" for my content. Some was on Wordpress, most was on FriendFeed and a growing amount of it was on Tumblr. So I created a Tumblr page and embedded a recent tumbles widget which partly solved the issue, but still was clunky at best.

Finally, I came across a post from Steve Rubel on how he had decided to move the bulk of his blogging to Posterous, so I made the decision to check it out. And I was immediately hooked. Two things made this a killer solution for me - first, I could use my favorite tool, Gmail, to create content. And second, Posterous could re-purpose this content everywhere I needed it to go. So, problem solved. And so far, I have no regrets. Here is how the workflow came together:

1. Any content (long, short, clip, media, pics etc) is put into Posterous - this is either via email, via iPhone email, or via bookmarklet. I can even create the content right from my Posterous website if I want.

2. Posterous cross-posts immediately to Wordpress (www.cjsparno.com) and to Twitter (@cjsparno). This means that readers of my main blog see it within seconds of the post happening, whether on the web, or on an iPhone.

3. FriendFeed grabs posts from Twitter.

That's it. I purposely removed feeds from and to Facebook since that app for me is for keeping up with friends and family (most of them get confused by my posts anyway LOL). Just for the heck of it, I created a fan page for my blog on Facebook, so technically, those that care can see all my posts to www.cjsparno.com there as well. But this is outside of the actual workflow.

I am very happy with Posterous, and with my simplified workflow. I can actually concentrate on writing now and not even think about where it will appear (or if it will appear in the right places). Do you have a similar flow, or ideas to enhance this one? I'd love to hear from you. And enjoy blogging with Posterous!