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Posterous cofounders create a replacement: Posthaven

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Re: Posterous cofounders create a replacement: Posthaven

#101

Post by joeyh »

garry wrote: post #68
ChuckMcM wrote: post #59

Its an interesting proposition, but fundamentally broken. Lets say you build it (and frankly I think a better course here would have been something based on the app.net model rather than WP Engine model) and its "successful" what does that mean to you? Here is the challenge, there are too many scenarios where you don't want to be. #1) "SPLOGGING" or some random thing becomes the new thing which all the cool kids are…

Thanks for this note. It's very much great advice, and right now we're heads down coding. I've never started a foundation and I have much more reading to do -- but it sounds like the right way to codify our pledge more permanently.

A foundation is one approach, and a valid one. You might end up with something like archive.org, except with a Wayback Machine that serves up actual historical content. (This would be an interesting direction for archive.org to take their Wayback Machine, if they could get sites like Posterus to donate the domain and data at shutdown.)

Another approach is to build a service where you make no promises about hosting content forever, but find ways to ensure that users own their data, and have full freedom of migration if you should close down.

Since 2010 I've been running http://branchable.com/ , which takes this approach. The same git clone of their site that users can make to edit it contains all their data and configuration. It's built on an open engine http://ikiwiki.info/ , so users can switch away at any time, with no conversion. Ikiwiki is a static site builder, so users can host on S3 or github, or anywhere if they decide to stop using Branchable. Even the management and business logic are open software, so if we folded tomorrow and someone wanted, they could recreate us using http://ikiwiki-hosting.branchable.com/

Branchable is not designed to have a fast burn, but we've had slow and steady growth, and happy users who continue paying the bills each month.

There's a lot of room in this space for sites serving different sets of users in ways that don't turn them into extruded VC product, so welcome to it!

Re: Posterous cofounders create a replacement: Posthaven

#102

Post by joeyh »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #59

Its an interesting proposition, but fundamentally broken. Lets say you build it (and frankly I think a better course here would have been something based on the app.net model rather than WP Engine model) and its "successful" what does that mean to you? Here is the challenge, there are too many scenarios where you don't want to be. #1) "SPLOGGING" or some random thing becomes the new thing which all the cool kids are…

An interesting term to look up when considering something like this is the cost to "endow a terabyte": To ensure that it's preserved continually, paid as an up-front cost.

IIRC archive.org manages this for somewhere around $2000 per terabyte. There's a lot of interesting research into predicting how changes in drive prices etc will play out and affect this number, that you can find by googleing the term.

Re: Posterous cofounders create a replacement: Posthaven

#104

Post by woah »

benrhughes wrote: post #89

This would have been perfect around a year ago. Once the writing was on the wall, I migrated 4 or 5 sites (kinda, mostly) to self hosted Wordpress. I would have happily shelled out $5/mth to go to posthaven, had it existed. Because WP bugs me, I've written my own lightweight markdown based thing in node[1] that I'm gradually moving everything to. On the upside, the Posterous thing finally taught me to not rely fully…

Why not just use docpad? https://github.com/bevry/docpad

Re: Posterous cofounders create a replacement: Posthaven

#105

Post by garry »

mceoin wrote: post #87

Hi Garry, This is a simple feature request but as someone who writes occasionally it is really important to me: will I be able to customize the domain name to have it as myname.com instead of posthaven.com/myname?

Yes, this will definitely be in the product and supported 100%.

Re: Posterous cofounders create a replacement: Posthaven

#106

Post by prawn »

garry wrote: post #81
8ig8 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about making this a non-profit, run by a board? Different idea, but, for example Matt M. created the WordPress Foundation to independently carry out the things he believed in. http://wordpressfoundation.org/

Yes. I love this idea. Right now I have to focus on coding, but this will be necessary down the road.

Might help in the event that something happens to both of you and users are left on a ghost ship of sorts.

Re: Posterous cofounders create a replacement: Posthaven

#107

Post by geuis »

I'm curious about the need to build this from a new code base. Posterous already exists. Why not negotiate a deal with twitter to aquire the code and start posthaven from that? Indeed, why not also aquire the posterous domain and just migrate to new servers? Put all existing blogs on lockdown, and if people want to continue as posterous customers they start paying $5 a month.

Re: Posterous cofounders create a replacement: Posthaven

#108

Post by prawn »

tferris wrote: post #92
garry wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I started working on Posterous in 2008, I intended to work on it forever. It didn't work out that way, and I left in January of 2011. It was a venture-funded company by then and we were committed to super-growth, not sustainability. We never started charging for the product. Posthaven is the result of my experience with that. I know the world needs a simple, clean, well-lit, easy place to post. One that doesn't…

> When I started working on Posterous in 2008 .. Just wondering: how can somebody start again something he worked already years on? I understand that you might learned a lot with Posterous and now you'd like to just employ that knowledge in a new blog project. But is it not a bit dangerous to stick to the same thing over years? You could loose time and after ten years looking back and you pity that you just worked on…

Can I propose (not too seriously) that a fifth hour each week be set aside for proof reading? ;)

Re: Posterous cofounders create a replacement: Posthaven

#109

Post by Terretta »

tedunangst wrote: post #79
rubyrescue wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

since you're posting here, you have a grocer's apostrophe on the home page... it's "URLs", not "URL's". second, can we auto-migrate somehow from a posterous backup - my wife runs a blog on posterous and is really worried that she needs to migrate. if i could tell her that she just now needs to pay $5/month and not rely on me to hack something together w/octopress and github she will be so excited.

Depends on your style guide. Sometimes the apostrophe is preferred for abbreviations because it separates the s. ie, it's not something I'd correct somebody for unless we had specifically and previously agreed to a particular style guide.

Because many people using HN are learning English as a second language, one should avoid dispensing bad writing advice.

The apostrophe is for possessives and contractions. Pluralization is neither.

Wrong: Greatest Hits of the 90's / The 90's' Greatest Hits / 1990's' Greatest Hits

Right: Greatest Hits of the 90s / The 90s' Greatest Hits / 1990's Greatest Hits

It's easy if you think of the difference between the plural and possessive "s" using the unabbreviated word:

Television's favorite stars are always on our televisions.

TV's favorite stars are always on our TVs.

Any style guide that writes that sentence a different way is simply wrong.

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