Posthaven Gazette

You can now publish to your Posthaven blogs via email. Doing this is as easy as sending an email message to post@posthaven from the email address you used to register your account. The subject line of your email becomes the title of your post and the content of your message becomes your post's content - including any images, documents or other files you may attach. 

Of course there's a lot more functionality than that. You'll find the details on their Post by Email page. The Posthaven Primer user guide has also been updated to include details on email posting.

I can't wait to try this out!

Posthaven launches fast, beautiful image galleries - The Official Posthaven Posthaven.

April 30th - the day Twitter shuts down the Posterous blog platform - is quickly approaching. If you have a Posterous blog and want to keep it, you need to be migrating your content NOW. I've migrated my sites to Posthaven, a Posterous replacement that's still under construction. Why Posthaven and not WordPress? Posthaven is a reconstruction of the Posterous platform by two of the original developers. It will have all the same features and functionality of Posterous - updated to take advantage of the latest advances in technology. I loved Posterous' simplicity and its email posting functionality. It has successfully served as a family journal and mailing service for several years because of those features.

Obviously, you don't build a platform like this overnight - even if you are recreating something you already know inside and out. The developers' first priority was to provide a clean migration path so Posterous users could move their blogs prior to the April 30th deadline. That functionality has been operational since the end of March. Both my Posterous blogs have been moved successfully for which I'm both very grateful and quite relieved. Although I am antsy to once again have all the features and functionality available, I'm finding it fascinating to watch Posthaven grow. This week pages, links and menus have been added.

Posthaven has one significant feature that makes it very different from Posterous. They will be charging $5/month to maintain up to 10 blogs in your Posthaven profile. With that fee comes a promise that Posthaven will be a durable platform that will "last forever". While no one can promise anything will last forever, it is comforting to know that these developers want to make their money by keeping their users happy instead of trying to attract buyers. And since I don't start paying until the site comes out of beta status - originally estimated at mid-April - I'm getting a good look at what I'll be paying for before I commit.

There's still quite a way to go: design themes, email posting and comments/replies, mobile apps and sharing to social networks - all requiring significant construction effort. It will be a while before I can enjoy all the things that made Posterous such a delightful family news service. If what I've seen so far is any example, it will be well worth the wait and the price.

Now that the Posterous migration functionality has been finalized, the Posthaven developers have started working on building out the feature set. The Post Settings section now includes options to add tags to a post, make the post private and schedule posts for publishing. I'm enjoying watching Posthaven come to life and look forward to having all my favorite features up and running.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Posterous users finally have a zero-data-loss option for switching to another blog platform. Read the Posterous Migration Guide to see how Posthaven stacks up against Wordpress, Tumblr, and Squarespace options. We've imported over 850,000 posts, photos, videos, audio files, and documents in just the past few weeks. 

 You now have full access to Posthaven and can import your existing Posterous blogs, create new blogs, create new posts using the web post editor. 

 Go to your Posthaven Dashboard to get started 

To keep on top of the latest feature updates, we recommend following @posthaven on Twitter. This project is under active development. 

Please feel free to email us at help@posthaven.com if you have questions, feedback, or anything we can help with. 

Yours faithfully in code, 

-- Garry and Brett 
Cofounders, Posthaven.com