It would be really nice if everything that you do with technology worked, worked well the first time, and never had a problem. Of course, you can add those wishes to the hundreds of others that you might have. It doesn’t always work that way.
For some, it’s the end of the world. For the hesitant user who you’ve finally convinced that doing something is good, a hiccup in the process can often be the excuse that’s needed to bail out. After all, it can sure be frustrating. The sophisticated user might slap their monitor and then move to fix the problem or just move on to something else.
A couple of examples have arisen in the past little while.
Posterous will turn off on April 30
The Posterous blogging platform has been a very easy platform to curate and share photos and others have made it their primary blogging platform. I would equate it to Tumblr in its functionality and appearance. Posting has been a slice when you install the bookmark tool or use Shareaholic. But, it’s going to close.
One Approach:
Get mad. Get frustrated. Shut down. After all, you’ve put so much work into your Posterous presence and now it’s gone. See, I told you the internet doesn’t work.
Another Approach:
OK, I’ve got until April 30 to do something about this. What can I do? First of all, you have until April 30 to enjoy your efforts. Unless you do something, it will ultimately close and all your work is gone. Nobody wants that so read the entire post and you’ll see that Posterous gives you instructions about how to get your content out of Posterous so that you don’t lost everything.
Or, read and follow the instructions elsewhere
- Import from Posterous to WordPress
- How to Back Up and Migrate Your Posterous Spaces to Tumblr, Blogger, or WordPress
OK, so WordPress is the answer?
It’s not perfect either. Check out this story from yesterday.
WordPress.com goes down, taking millions of blogs (and us) with it
That’s interesting. This blog is hosted by WordPress.com. I didn’t even know that there was an interruption in the service. But, I suppose that it could be that you were affected. I hope now. Fortunately, WordPress seems to have recovered nicely. All is good as I work on this post.
That does it. I’m moving my blog.
Well, you could over react. There are many other very good blogging sites – Jux, Blogger, Tumblr. They’ll never have problem. (tongue in cheek)
That does it. I’m going to host my own.
That’s always an option. After all, the WordPress code is free to download and install. It absolutely is and thousands of people use their own WordPress instance daily. That only requires that you purchase hosting space, install and maintain your code and do your own backups.
The best approach? I think that it’s pretty clear that there are many alternatives and that’s the joy and the power of being online. Despite the small moments of frustration and inconvenience, the stats lie heavily in favour of stableness and continuity. You just need to calm down, take it easy, make intelligent and informed decisions and then move on. After all, there are a lot of smart people working behind the scenes and they really are aiming for 100% uptime.
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Related articles
- Twitter will shut down Posterous at the end of April (digitaltrends.com)
- One year after being acquired by Twitter, Posterous shuts it all down (venturebeat.com)
- How to ensure your blog posts last forever. (dougbelshaw.com)
- Twitter Pulls the Plug on Posterous (socialtimes.com)
- Blogging: The Technical Side (InsuranceFiles.com)
- Blogging platform Posterous to shut down on April 30th (theverge.com)
- Posterous to shutdown April 30th, focusing on Twitter (neowin.net)
- Posterous, which was long Tumblr’s main competitor in the Tumblog space before Twitter bought it out, is shutting down in April. More: (shortformblog.com)
doug -- off the record 
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