After toying with Wordpress until I was blue in the face, I've decided to give Posterous a go. That's not to say that I don't like Wordpress, I love it in fact, but Posterous' interface and overall system is very, very attractive to the casual blogger.
If you haven't heard of it, Posterous is a blogging platform that sits somewhere between the pure simplicity of Twitter and the more complex nature and interface of Wordpress. The simplicity of it is what really drew me in. Basically, if you can e-mail it - you can post it. Posterous allows you to send e-mail messages that include just about any filetype you can imagine from photos, videos and audio files to PDFs, Word documents and spreadsheets. Depending on the filetype, it then formats it for the best method of display. It automatically creates things such as galleries for multiple photos and includes slick inline players for audio and video files as well as auto-formatting things such as YouTube links. Posterous also includes a basic web-based editor (that I'm using right now) to create posts however it does not give you the ability to attach or insert any media in your posts. Hopefully this is something they improve on in the future.
Posterous takes it a step further by offering an 'autopost' feature that will cross-post your Posterous postings across social media sites you tell it to including Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, MySpace, Tumblr and even Wordpress blogs. It also offers a Bookmarklet tool that gleans content and media from sites you are browsing making for easy posting of this stuff as well. You can use a Posterous subdomain (http://yourname.posterous.com) for your blog or even set up, as I have, your own domain name which does take a little bit of tech savvy. I was hard-pressed to find a tutorial on setting up Posterous' custom domain name feature using either my domain name registrar or my web hosting control panel but as you can see, I figured it out.
The only downsides I have discovered thus far is that Posterous only affords you 1 Gigabyte of disk space for your content which you could eat up rather quickly if you post a lot of photos or large video or audio files (Posterous does not limit the filesize of the content you upload). Additionally, Posterous is severely lacking in the theme department. There are a handful of pretty basic themes built in and a few others available at themes.posterous.com but that's pretty much it - you are limited to around 15 or so themes for the time being. The good news is that Posterous includes a theme editor so if you are skilled with HTML/CSS you can edit the existing themes or even build your own. For my blog, I re-worked one of the themes.posterous.com themes (you can download my theme here.)
All-in-all, I'm impressed with Posterous thus far. There is room for improvement, especially with the web-based editor and more themes, but I'm finding it to be a powerful, extremely easy to use and convienent blogging tool and would highly recommend checking it out!
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