Posterous and URLs

33 points by robotadam 15 years ago | 26 comments

a4agarwal 15 years ago |

1. I hope we add this soon

2. I'm going to take my chances among the HN community and say: I think this is low priority because

i. Most other services don't even offer import. Posterous offers import from (soon to be) 15+ services. this is not easy

ii. Posterous supports all different post/media types so that we can import from so many different services. We put our focus here

iii. I care about sharing with my family and friends. They don't care about permanent URLs as much as being able to find my site and search for what they want. cc/google

If you are a pro blogger (and maybe you are), and you have major google juice on some URLs, then yes, maybe you care about this. But most people aren't, and don't.

There are many reasons why someone should or shouldn't move between competing services on the internet. But urls seems like a very small reason to make that decision. Future services (Posterous or maybe others!) might offer super compelling reasons to move.

Not moving because of urls seems like not switching to a Mac because you have all the Windows keyboard shortcuts memorized.

In my lifetime, I expect to move between blogging platforms, phone providers, desktop OSs. I will buy different brands of cars, live in different neighborhoods, probably even switch email providers.

Yes, there are switching costs. But we hope to minimize them. And more importantly, we hope to focus on adding awesome features so you are willing to incur that switching cost.

jeff18 15 years ago | |

> Not moving because of urls seems like not switching to a Mac because you have all the Windows keyboard shortcuts memorized.

In the spirit of the recent "raw unsolicited advice" to Posterous trend, here are my thoughts: I was impressed when you guys responded saying you were going to add this feature soon. However, playing it down with car, phone, and operating system analogies feels sort of patronizing and makes me worry that you guys might not understand the full scope of the issue:

a) You will lose all of your page rank

b) Anyone who has linked to you (including yourself) will have a broken link

Sure, for some number of users this doesn't matter. For the people who care about it, it is, by definition, very important. What's the point of trying to play down their concern?

Tichy 15 years ago | |

Just support moving the URLs. Not that big of a deal.

Posted from my MacBook

ydant 15 years ago | |

Switching URLs is nothing like switching shortcuts. The impact is one person on switching keyboard shortcuts, but if I switch around URLs I'm impacting hundreds (or thousands).

I'm no "pro blogger" by any means, but I have a couple of posts (that were migrated from stand-alone pages) that get a decent amount of traffic. A large portion of that traffic is from forums, other blog posts, and the like. Not from "Google juice". To change that URL means I'd have to contact all of those people - hardly workable.

I don't really care about the page rank, but I have content people find useful and I want them to continue to be able to find it.

TrevorBurnham 15 years ago | |

Just to add my voice to the chorus: I'm tired of maintaining my personal WordPress blog and worrying about the latest security issues. Posterous now has all the features I need. But I don't want to break every link to my posts.

If you have other priorities, that's cool; just know that this is a feature that's definitely going to bring you more users.

RyanMcGreal 15 years ago | |

It's great that you offer easy importing of existing blogs - but if you're going to do it, you need to do it the right way. That means supporting existing URLs. Breaking URLs every time a site changes its underlying codebase breaks the web of links.

pablohoffman 15 years ago |

I also find annoying that Posterous, for some reason, appends numeric suffixes arbitrarily to certain post slugs (for example: http://blog.pablohoffman.com/hi-posterous-58). It's like they have to make the post slug "globally unique", instead of "unique per blog", although they shouldn't have to.

It wouldn't be that bad if you could change the slug/url but, as the article correctly points out, you can't.

jrnkntl 15 years ago | |

This is indeed a namespace thing, every posterous blog uses the same global namespace. They said this will be changed.

See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1443020

ydant 15 years ago | | |

There are little quirks in the service that make it seem pretty obvious the (first) custom sub-domains and then (later) custom domains were added on later. The namespace issue seems downright silly until you remember that fact.

Now that every blog is on its own subdomain at the least, I'd imagine this could be cleaned up - hopefully with the ability for custom URLs at the same time...

rksprst 15 years ago | |

Google actually wants you to add a unique number to the URLs. It's in one of their FAQs. That's probably why there are doing it (to help with seo on Google).

chaosmachine 15 years ago | | |

"Google actually wants you to add a unique number to the URLs."

I think you're mistaken.

fookyong 15 years ago |

This is one of those "mom do I haaaaave to????" pieces of functionality that engineers (I say this as an engineer-type) hate.

I would procrastinate for weeks before implementing something like this. It's boring, complex, and affects a tiny minority of users.

However to engineers like me, we have to remember that even though the number of end-users might be small, in this case they are inherently more valuable than the average user. They bring a cache of readers with them and if they like the user experience, can potentially evangelize the product for you more effectively than someone starting a blog from scratch can.

danieldon 15 years ago | |

As an engineer, I don't think preserving URLs is a minor issue.

jackowayed 15 years ago | | |

He never said it was. He said that it affects a small number of users (because most of Posterous users are starting fresh, not moving from a blog that they actually care about) and that it's complex.

rantfoil 15 years ago |

This is great feedback. We hope to get this in soon. Thanks very much for the support and suggestions.

jeff18 15 years ago |

That would be really interesting if Tumblr and other sites create a posterous importer and everyone is a good 302 redirect citizen. Then you could switch to any service at any point, seamlessly.

Tichy 15 years ago | |

It's called DNS.

ydant 15 years ago |

Agreed. That and dates in URLs (or at least search by date) would be handy. I just migrated a blog over and ran into the same issue. In my case, I was ok with changing domains as well, so I set up a load of redirects on the old one to the new one. It's not a perfect solution and it missed some, but it'll work for now.

JoachimSchipper 15 years ago |

For the purposes of linking, you could just redirect appropriately from <yourdomain> to www.<yourdomain> or the other way round...

jeb 15 years ago |

Just setup htaccess on your original server to redirect to the new URLs. If you care so much about google juice, then you can spend a day doing this, instead of requiring posterous to solve the problem for you.

fookyong 15 years ago | |

how?

DNS will resolve to posterous' servers. It's out of your old server's control by that point.

Unless you're talking about different domains, e.g. moving from

mycoolblog.com self hosted -> myawesomeblog.com on posterous

in that case you could do what you said, but I don't think that's what the OP is talking about. the issue is when you use the same domain on both.

petervandijck 15 years ago |

yea amen to that

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