Once Posterous got acquired by Twitter it was only a matter of time before the great blogging platform got sunset. Well, the inevitable has finally happened so I need to find a new home for my personal blog.

The announcement email indicated that Wordpress and Squarespace had ways to import from Posterous, and since I’ve never been a fan of Wordpress, here I am giving Squarespace another shot. 

A few annoying things to note about the import:

Image Handling:

While your galleries get imported, you will need to re-set the way you want your images to show up. I had several posts that included several smaller galleries (seperated by blocks of text), but the Squarespace import puts them all into one combined gallery. I found no easy way to break them apart within the admin console, so I essentially had to re-import the ones that got messed up. While this was a pain, it was made a little easier by utilizing the Posterous backup, which saved all the original images in folders based on the post date.

But make no mistake. It is a MAJOR pain. Took me several weeks just to go through all the posts and re-import and format a bunch of them. One of the main ways I used Posterous was to publish posts with lots of images, organized in specific ways. On the plus side, it actually gave me a chance to revisit some of these old posts which I had forgotten about. Love the fact that these memories can be preserved this way.

One nice byproduct of this is the fact that Squarespace has more controls over gallery presentation, so at least I was able to take advantage of this feature to not have all my posts with images look the same.

Some images actually came across with body content moved into the caption area of the image. Not sure what caused this to happen, but if you happen to come across a post that has oddly-styled text, that’s probably one of them that I didn’t get around to cleaning up.

Video Handling:

Posterous posts that included videos embedded from other websites like YouTube and Vimeo came across just fine. However, I also had several posts where I uploaded video directly to Posterous. They had their own video player so they were able to host video files captured and sent via iPhone. The posts that contained any Posterous-hosted video were basically hosed. Squarespace does not host video files (or at least not that I can see yet), so I had to re-upload all the videos to YouTube. The problem here is, many of them were shot on iPhone, in vertical orientation. Vertical videos on YouTube stink since they get massive black bars on the left and right and don't maximize the vertical real estate.

Social Content:

I preferred the designs of some of the Portfolio templates as a starting point, but unfortunately, some of the blog capabilities from Posterous are not visible in these templates. Comments, likes, and tweets are preserved in data, but don’t show up unless you pick from one of the Blog templates. I checked with Customer Service, and unfortunately there isn’t a way to get the tags into the specific template I like. 

All in all, I like Squarespace, but it’s a paid service which means I need to think twice before activating the blog my twins had been writing just for fun.

Site Presentation:

Squarespace has some pretty nicely-designed templates to start with. This makes getting up and running pretty easy and fast. There's also a good bit of customization allowed but I haven't quite figured out how to make dramatic changes. Posterous gave you access to full markup and CSS, which made it easy to get exactly what I wanted. It’s probably going to take me awhile to figure out how to do that on Squarespace.

I’m annoyed by the fact that the top menu changes for no good reason when I navigate away from the "Work" tab.