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Pretty Good Hat

Posthaven open for business

Several months ago I spent some time looking into alternatives to Posterous for a private family blog that I use mostly to share stories, photos and videos of my toddler. At the time this search was driven by the desire to use a paid platform, rather than a free one, in line with my goal of using services whose business model is based on making money rather than “monetizing” users. Nothing quite met my needs, and the transition was not imperative, so I let the search fade amid plenty of other things to keep me busy.

With the recent announcement of the closure of Posterous by twitter, I started looking again. Turns out that what Posterous does, it does very well, its strengths line up quit well with my requirements for a family-blog, and most of the alternatives are not a very good match.

Here’s what Posterous does well:

  • Post by email
  • Password protection of entire site, without user accounts or user-specific logins
  • Support for video
  • Easy presentation of photo galleries

I’m quite happy to be able to say that, as of my import to it this morning, Posthaven accomplishes three of the four of those strengths – no surprise, of course, as Posthaven is meant specifically as a sustainable (ie non-free) refuge for Posterous users.

Posthaven is open for business but not quite 100%: you can import multimedia posts (and my galleries and video came over flawlessly, unlike with any other premium service that I tried, Squarespace I’m looking pointedly at you, here) but not yet create them; post by email is not yet there; and a post I wrote up using Safari on the iPad didn’t format paragraphs correctly, instead flowing everything into a single one that I had to re-edit once I got back to my MacBook. But custom domains work great and site-wide privacy from launch is exactly what I needed out of the gate. I think it’s going to be a great replacement and I wish them lots of success, so that I don’t have to go looking again.

Update March 19, 2013: The posthaven post interface now includes an ‘upload images’ button, so creating media posts now seems to be available.