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Twitter-Owned Posterous Loses Databases, Offline for 2 Hours Plus

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Re: Twitter-Owned Posterous Loses Databases, Offline for 2 Hours Plus

#2
Posterous was a great service until a couple of years ago. It was such a neat idea: combine blogging with mailing lists. It was simple and easy.

Then they began to have multiple problems. Email notifications would fail to arrive from time to time. Various over-ajaxed functions, including composing a new post and various administrative pages, stopped working on one or another browser. I had to use Chrome whenever I visited my family blog because things would not render properly in Firefox. Then I had to go back to Firefox because files wouldn't upload properly in Chrome. I suspect the problems had to do with the introduction of the "Spaces" thing, which AFAIK never really took off. I didn't even bother to complain because by that time, I'd stopped Posterous for anything important anyway. Then they were acquired by Twitter, and around the same time, most of the problems I'd been experiencing mysteriously went away.

It's sad to see such a great service slowly killing itself. First they ruined a perfectly working product by slapping half-baked social-networking bullshit on it, and then they got acquired by a company that has little to do with email blogging. On the plus side, they seem to have stopped developed "Spaces" since the acquisition, which probably helped prevent the further introduction of bullshit and unstable features.

Re: Twitter-Owned Posterous Loses Databases, Offline for 2 Hours Plus

#3
I hope they publish a post-mortem when all is resolved, it'd be an interesting read. I remember hearing that they had a fairly complex mix of MySQL, Riak, and Varnish caching, in what sounded like a reasonably well-thought-out design.

Also, there's probably a fail-whale joke in here somewhere :-)

Re: Twitter-Owned Posterous Loses Databases, Offline for 2 Hours Plus

#4
Posterous seemed - like twitter - perfect because of it's simplicity. Email meets blogging.

I think spaces made it sort of awkward and was disappointed that it essentially stopped development since being acquired by twitter. I'm starting to wish these acqui-hires were more focused on improving the product rather than just getting the programming team to work on completely different products.

Re: Twitter-Owned Posterous Loses Databases, Offline for 2 Hours Plus

#5
I liked Posterous for its e-mail posting, connection to YC, and easy-ish theme editor. Unfortunately, my experience has degraded significantly since I first started blogging regularly on Posterous, with most of the degradation occurring after the acquisition. For example, my embedded YouTube videos demonstrating my Kinect-powered home automation system are no longer embedded in my older blog posts! Modifying old posts isn't cool.

In addition to that, I get a 404 error when trying to manage the posts on my "space," and elements of the web-based post editor are no longer working. Once a post has been edited, it can take hours for it to show up on the blog's main feed. Finally, Posterous pages load very slowly these days. I stopped reporting bugs when I found that my reports were reaching an outsourced customer interaction company rather than an actual Posterous team member.

I wish the Posterous founders well on their future work at Twitter, but needless to say, I'm in the market for a new blog host.

Re: Twitter-Owned Posterous Loses Databases, Offline for 2 Hours Plus

#6
post #5

I liked Posterous for its e-mail posting, connection to YC, and easy-ish theme editor. Unfortunately, my experience has degraded significantly since I first started blogging regularly on Posterous, with most of the degradation occurring after the acquisition. For example, my embedded YouTube videos demonstrating my Kinect-powered home automation system are no longer embedded in my older blog posts! Modifying old post…

Once I moved to NYC, I jumped on the Tumblr bandwagon and haven't looked back. My Posterous is gathering dust these days. Especially with the Tumblr iOS app -- it's beautiful and effective.

Re: Twitter-Owned Posterous Loses Databases, Offline for 2 Hours Plus

#8

whats the best way to dump all my content ? I've looked at their json api but was hoping someone has written an easy script to convert this to something usable to replace my blog/personal page.

i imported all my posterous, other blogs stuff into jekyll: https://github.com/mojombo/jekyll/wiki/Blog-Migrations (mind you, the original posterous migration from jekyll does not work anymore, so you will have to use this one https://github.com/pepijndevos/jekyll/blob/patch-1/lib/jekyl... )

then with jekyll you can host your blog as github pages - this, to me, seems like the best option to anything that is out there.

Re: Twitter-Owned Posterous Loses Databases, Offline for 2 Hours Plus

#10
I don't think tweeting that you've "lost a database" without any additional context is a very good idea. I'm going to guess that they meant the database was temporarily unavailable to their application servers, but it could easily be interpreted to mean that they had suffered massive data loss with no backups.
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