My Creekside Chatter blog in Posthaven
My Creekside Chatter blog has been painlessly - and successfully - migrated from Posterous to Posthaven. As you can see there's not much here in the way of design, but with the April 30th shutdown for Posterous looming, pretty is not the priority right now. It's getting those sites moved off Posterous.
Posthaven site settings screen
Once you get into Posthaven's backend, you immediately see that they are still focused on migration. The settings page is quite sparse and should remain so for some time yet.
A view of the posts page in Posthaven.
I do like the clean look - not just here on the posts list page, but also in the editing screen (below). I don't expect Posthaven to be a "full-service" blog platform with every whistle and bell known to man. I want clean and simple - exactly what Posterous provided and what Posthaven plans to deliver.
The Posthaven editor screen.
So, right now you can import up to 10 blogs to Posthaven, create and publish new posts via the web interface and even include images and other media. As of March 27th, the importer component was complete with no reported bugs and they declared the platform officially in a public beta status. It is my understanding that there will be no charges made to blog customers until they exit beta status - expected to happen sometime later this month.
Plans are to have all the capabilities Posterous had, including my favorite - posting via email. These will be announced as they are deployed. All the code is being completely rewritten to take advantage of latest technology so it won't all happen immediately. And, having people dedicated to maintaining and improving the platform will insure this delightful little blog platform stays . . . delightful.
The $5/month cost will get you up to 10 Posthaven blogs. If you want more, you can have them for a small (yet to be determined) price. They are serious about their pledge to keep Posthaven up "forever". Yes, that is quite a commitment, but they are already looking into building a foundation to support the program even if something happens to the developers.
While "free" is always tempting, both Posterous and Google Reader have shown us that free is seldom the best option. Hopefully Posthaven has found the pricing sweet spot that gives us beautiful blogs we can all afford.