How to import Posterous to self-hosted WordPress

February 17, 2013 By

With the news that Posterous will be closing on April 30, 2013, many people are now looking to export their content and start to publish on a different platform. We tend to always recommend self-hosting if your site is important to you and your business, partly because third-party services can close or change, and partly because it gives you a lot more control over backups.

WordPress is particularly suited to self-hosting, as it’s so widely used and most hosting services will offer a simple one-click install to get you up and running. The complications tend to come with adjusting the look and functionality to exactly what you require, and that’s certainly something we can help with.

So assuming you don’t want to move from Posterous to another third party service like WordPress.com, Tumblr etc, what do you need to do?

 

Setting up self-hosted WordPress:

To set up your site, you need 2 things. The first is your domain name, if you don’t have one already. The second is your hosting account, and for most sites this can be organised quickly for a few pounds per month.

If that is already filling you with fear, give us a shout as we run hosting a number of websites, including installing WordPress, setting up themes and plugins, and organising regular backups.

Once that’s in place, you’ll need to wait for the hosting to be up and running to allow you to install WordPress. Once that’s done, you can then transfer your content across. When that’s complete, the final step will be to change any existing domain names to point to your new site.

You now have 2 options for getting your content into your new site – one doesn’t require a Posterous export, but we’ll cover it anyway as it’s good practice to always keep a secure backup on your computer or an external hard drive.

 

Exporting from Posterous:

Log into your Posterous account, and you’ll see a bright yellow ‘BackUp’ button in the top right of the dashboard. Clicking on that will arrange for a backup to be created for export (You’ll need to wait a little while for it to be ready). Once it’s prepared, you’ll see a green ‘Download’ option which will export your existing content.

BadgerGravlingPosterousBackUp

This will let you download a Zip file which contains contains your content.

 

Importing into self-hosted WordPress:

Option 1: Using a Plugin:

There’s a useful Posterous Importer plugin available which will import posts, comments, tags, and attachments directly via the Posterous API. Simply go to the Plugins section of your WordPress dashboard, select ‘Add New’ and search for Posterous Importer and you should see it as the first result (Authors include Automattic, the company which runs WordPress).

Once this is installed and activated, you’ll then be able to go to Tools in your WordPress dashboard, select Import, and Posterous will now be a listed option.

Click on Posterous, enter the url of your current Posterous site, along with your username and password, and the import will begin when you click submit.

PosterousImport

Hopefully that will work for you nice and easily. You’ll then need to go through and check each post, amending author details etc as required.

If it doesn’t work for any reason, there is a slightly more complicated alternative.

 

Option 2: Importing via WordPress.com

If that doesn’t work, the other option is to use the importer created for WordPress.com, and then export from that version to your self-hosted site.

So you just need to sign up at WordPress.com (Which is the hosted version of WordPress). Once that’s done, look in the Tool section of your new site, and then click on the Posterous import option.

This method will now ask you to upload the wordpress_export_1.xml file from your Posterous export earlier. This will then be uploaded to your WordPress.com site. There’s a more detailed tutorial on the WordPress.com site, so I won’t repeat their instructions.

Once that’s done, you can then choose to export from WordPress.com. And then go to your self-hosted site, select Tools and the WordPress importer. Choose the .xml file to upload from your WordPress.com export, and you should be all set.

Obviously this version does include a couple of extra steps which are a bit of a pain, but could be useful if the Posterous API stops working prior to April 30.

 

Finishing off the process:

Finally, once all your content is in your new site, spend some time checking the author names, embedded videos and anything else which may have changed during the import process. If you’ve got thousands of posts, then start with any that you know are particularly popular!

If you’re mapping an existing domain name across to your new site, now’s the time to do it. If you want to keep the same url structure and avoid losing any links, you’ll need to go to ‘Settings’ and select the ‘Permalinks’ option. The default setting for Posterous appears to be ‘Post Name’, which displays as http://danthornton.net/sample-post/ for example.

Finally you can play around with the look of your site, and the additional extensions that are available to WordPress users.

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49% of the world’s top 100 blogs are using WordPress

April 12, 2012 By

An interesting study released yesterday by Pingdom reveals that 49% of the top 100 blogs as ranked by Technorati are using WordPress as their CMS platform.

You can debate whether Technorati is still a decent ranking system, and it doesn’t include 8 sites for which information wasn’t available, but 40% of the sites with available information are on self-hosted WordPress (with 9% on WordPress.com’s hosted alternative). The article also has an informative list of what each of the top sites is actually running on – sadly TheWayoftheWeb just missed out on making the list, but for the record, I’ve been using self-hosted WordPress for a number of years now for pretty much all my sites (I do have one or two on both Blogger and Tumblr).

There are a number of reasons why I recommend self-hosted WordPress, including the fact that you have ultimate control over design, data etc, and as long as you’re backing up regularly, you’re better offer in the event of hosting/domain name failures.

It also gets increasingly easy to use – in addition to usability improvements to the core product, all the big third party theme providers and frameworks have made big steps in making everything quicker and easier to setup. Most of my sites currently run on the Genesis framework from StudioPress (aff link), but there are also great products I’ve been checking out from the likes of Headway and Pagelines, who are both offering drag and drop customisation.

More and more themes are now coming with responsive design as standard (meaning your site automatically works on mobile/tablets), and it’s really easy to find extremely talented designers and developers who are not only familiar with WordPress, but the relative ubiquity of it keeps prices fairly realistic. If you’re stuck for designers/developers I’m always happy to recommend several that I’ve enjoyed working with both on my own sites and client projects.

And that’s before you get into the various projects built on top of WordPress – for example, Jigoshop, a client of mine who produce a frankly amazing WordPress eCommerce solution. Not only can you install and set-up a fully functioning online store for free, but there’s an amazing range of extensions for it already which means your shop has all the services at a level you’d expect for a big online retailer.

And if you need some help, I can provide domain names and hosting, plus initial set-up for a low fee, having currently set up a number of sites for my own projects and for a range of friends and businesses, which regularly get many thousands of visitors each month, so feel free to contact me. I’ve also had experience of transferring sites from other platforms, and if you just want some quick tips, advice or reassurance, feel free to give me a shout!

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Great job opportunity for UK Web Developers…

October 28, 2011 By

If you’re a UK-based Web Developer looking for a career with a brilliant and fast-growing company, then one of my clients, Jigowatt (creators of Jigoshop) , might have just the thing for you.

They’re looking for talented and experienced web developers to become a core part of the team, with the opportunity to become a core part of evolving the brilliant Jigoshop WordPress eCommerce product, and also the chance to work on a range of interesting projects for a growing number of clients.

You can read the full details on the Jigowatt and Jigoshop hiring here, but there are a number of things to consider that aren’t in the formal details.

  • The team are great to work with – all very talented, all very driven, and all nice enough that they can put up with me in the office. And there’s a great atmosphere in the office.
  • The company has existed for 3+ years and continues to grow at a good rate.
  • You’ll get a chance to choose what’s on the office stereo – at least when Chris isn’t at his desk and he’s left Spotify running.
  • Almost every day someone brings in cakes and biscuits, which is brilliant if you’ve overslept and missed breakfast.
  • And most importantly – as a free and open source project, Jigoshop is all about the amazing community, whether that’s the contributions made via Github, the designers and developers adapting Jigoshop for clients, or end users, and it’s a wonderfully gratfying experience to be able to help, support and encourage that community to achieve the best results. It’s what is really seperating the Jigoshop experience, and makes it a joy to work on.

I can honestly say that working with Jigoshop is one of the most fun things I’ve ever managed to get paid to do. So if you’re a web developer, you really should check out the ad.

 

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Gentleman, we can rebuild him…

July 15, 2011 By

Today I have been mainly breaking things and fixing them again in the backend of this site and some of my others, hence why I’m currently running a bare bones implementation of the basic Genesis framework.

So far today I have:

  • Managed to break the free theme I was using, and finally decide to get a move on with redoing this site, so invested in full access to Studiopress themes – something I’ve meant to do for ages since starting out with their Metro theme.
  • Managed to recover all of the posts from 140char.com before it became just a link blog, import them into a fresh WordPress install, and then export them to be merged into this site. They’re now in, safe and sound, although I think most of the images will take some work to sort out manually.

That’s in addition to client work, of course.

 

Things left to do:

  • Update TheWayoftheWeb to the latest Mysql database as it doesn’t happen automatically on Godaddy, so I can’t upgrade to the latest WordPress until it’s sorted.
  • Decide whether to use a Genesis child theme, or start customising this one.
  • Re-categorise all 140char.com posts and permanently redirect the url to them for the small trickle of traffic still visiting it.
  • Sort all the images again.
  • Add all the usual widgets, ranking sites and other bumph which bloggers do to slow down their sites.

And then catch up on all my other sites, all my client work and collapse…

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Client solves Ecommerce for WordPress via Open Source

July 14, 2011 By

I don’t often write about clients on my blog for various reasons, but I wanted to spread the word about Jigoshop, which is a great Ecommerce for WordPress solution that I’ve been working on for a couple of months now. One reason is simply that it’s a really good product which I can easily recommend – as part of research I played around with the alternatives and I can honestly say that I’d already decided to use Jigoshop to power a couple of future projects before working with them. And the other is that it’s one of the first times I’ve been working on a project which is delivering something via Open Source, rather than using OS products as an end user.

Jigoshop Ecommerce for WordPress

 

So what makes Jigoshop so good?

It’s worth explaining that the company behind it, Jigowatt, specialises in Ecommerce sites for a large range of clients, using both WordPress and Magento, so they’ve spent a lot of time working with all the existing ways to produce effective and attractive online stores, and have particular experience handling the backend admin side of getting lots of products uploaded and ranking in search for their clients. That means they’ve got a long list of all the features that they wish existed and eventually reached the point that they knew it made more sense to build something to answer all their problems.

It’s incredibly quick and simple to use – even I can get an online store up and running in about 20 minutes. But at the same time it’s also highly configurable when you want to get into setting attributes, localising your shop, and stock management.

 

The benefits of a true Open Source Ecommerce solution

I was lucky enough to start getting involved with Jigowatt and Jigoshop when they started discussing how to licence Jigoshop, and how they could try and ensure that it has the optimum chance of being the best possible product, and also how it can generate revenue to justify continuing to work on it alongside the masses of client work they’ve got at any time. They had already started discussing the open source model, obviously drawing from their experience with the likes of WordPress and other open source developments and plugins, and they’d also been open and honest on their blog about their ideas – which led to really helpful input from other WordPress plugin developers, for instance, comments and suggestions from some of the guys at RocketGenius, who make the great Gravity Forms solution.

I also whittered on about everything from the birth of the Free Software Foundation and Open Source to the business models used by the likes of Arduino, and slowly the shape of the Jigoshop business model emerged, which was to release the shop itself under a GPL licence.

  • That means that you can download it, get your store up and running, and take payments via Paypal without having to sign-up for a trial or submit a credit card.
  • And it means anyone can build on top of it, whether that’s additional features or themes etc.

The revenue streams are all around specific extensions to the main Jigoshop platform, whether it’s payment gateways or specific themes, as well as allowing donations. And that’s an approach I really hope works for this specific project, because I really want to see Jigoshop continue and evolve.

 

It’s not just me recommending Jigoshop

Obviously as a client, I might be a little biased, but the good thing is that absolutely loads of WordPress specialists and big independent sites have been giving positive reviews to Jigoshop, reinforcing the fact that it’s a really good product. Just some of the mentions since it launched include Mashable, ThemesForge, and Envato. And there’s a growing forum community on the site which is worth checking out.

 

So I figured there’s enough to justify writing about a client for once! And obviously if you’re interested in finding out more about the range of freelance content and marketing services on offer, then please do get in touch….

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Problems embedding Youtube videos in WordPress etc?

February 22, 2011 By

Update Aug 2012:

It appears that for a lot of videos, the old embed code isn’t appearing any more. The reason for this is that if videos are enabled for 3D when they are uploaded, then the old embed code doesn’t work. If you’re looking to embed a video which you have uploaded to Youtube, then the solution is to disable the 3D option. Sometimes the old embed code doesn’t appear straight away, but it seems that if you disable embedding, then re-enable, Youtube will then pick up on the change and the option will appear.

Although, given the changes, I’d recommend considering newer WordPress themes and solutions which can use the new embed option where-ever possible.

 

 

I’ve seen a few people ask why embedding Youtube videos seems to have stopped working on their WordPress blog recently, so thought I’d quickly share the reason.

Basically Youtube (And Vimeo), both released a new embed code a while ago, to enable viewing through Flash and HTML5. But when you put that new code into HTML view in WordPress, and then publish or go back to View mode, it disapears.

Fortunately the old version is still available if you click the appropriate box under the Embed options:

Hope that helps…

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Content marketing, user data and the dangers of free WordPress themes

January 14, 2011 By

Bit of a link post from me today as I’ve been working on a number of things for clients, and also updating some other projects. So rather than adding to the list that I intend to blog about someday, here’s some important things to consider:

Arm yourself with content, for Goliath is coming: Interesting post which reiterates a lot of the things I’ve been saying about content and marketing over the last 6 months – now is the time to start doing it. More and more companies are realising how useful content and social media marketing can be, and how much ROI it can produce, so you’re going to see more and more content fighting for attention. And given that it takes time to build an attentive audience, you don’t want to wait around any longer!

Myspace on the auction blog. What happens to user data?: Given that I’ve just been writing about social media content and user data from the perspective of future historians having access, it’s also important to consider what happens to that data if a site sells to another owner, rather than shutting down. How do you feel about your content, information and contacts being transferred? Another reason to adopt a hub and spoke model, with ownership of your own content/business/contact hub. And it’s so easy to do with the availability of self-publishing tools…

The hidden dangers of free WordPress themes: But although setting up WordPress, for example, is pretty easy, there are still dangers that you need to be aware of. For instance, only using themes from trusted sources, and checking them before you install them. Do you know what links are contained in the theme you downloaded from a random website? The original post shows the examples of how you can actually decode what could be hidden in a theme. There are a couple of solutions – one is to only pick themes from trusted sources, and the other is to bite the bullet and pay for themes from trusted sources. For instance, in my case, I tend to pay for themes from StudioPress, but there are some other good alternatives, such as Woo Themes (which I’ve used on some client sites, for example).

So why not spend the weekend getting started on your 2011 digital content and marketing. And feel free to pose any questions in the comments – if I can’t answer them, there’s a growing number of people reading this site who probably can!

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A couple of weeks of catching up…

June 4, 2010 By

Life is has been a bit hectic over the last couple of weeks, with three conferences, a new sponsor, and a new logo for ORD amongst other things….

So in the past 2 weeks I’ve been at The Specialist Media Show (hosting a roundtable), The Open Mobile Summit (As a guest of Nokia), and M-Publishing (hosting another round table).

It’s been really interesting to see the differences with 3 events in such close proximity. The Specialist Media Show launched this year with the first event in Peterborough, attracting a lot of print publishers who have an enormous amount of knowledge in their specialist areas, but are generally still a bit nervous about digital, and intrigued but curious about mobile.

It was really good to chat to a lot of people who have the passion and knowledge of global niche subjects to result in successful digital businesses, and I think the conference helped a few of them find a stronger resolve to drive ahead with digital.

The next day’s Open Mobile Summit was a world apart as it provides a platform for a lot of senior people and big names in mobile – unfortunately I could only attend for one day, but there were definitely a number of brilliant talks and panel discussions. I went from being the only person checking in on Fourquare in Peterborough to sitting near the founder of Gowalla in 24 hours! And it was good to chat more to the Nokia team and find out more about what they have planned – they’re definitely not standing still..

And then came M-Publishing – which as a mobile event concentrating on publishing was extremely focused, pretty fast-moving, and very valuable to anyone producing text/video/audio content and hoping to mobilise and monetise it. Really interesting talks and debates, and a lot of fairly honest and open discussion about what has worked and what might not have succeeded in the mobile space.

I think the main thing out of all of this is that a growing number of people in traditional content are starting to get their heads around digital. I might have spent 5-10 years complaining about how reluctant they were, and there’s still a massive way to go for many of them, but I really do think they’re starting to change – possibly inspired the most by the lure of the iPhone/iPad/iTunes route. And it’s going to push digital companies to innovate even faster, which is going to be interesting.

You may notice a lovely animated banner on here and 140char.com – Bullguard, and their internet security products, which is not only good from a ‘I won’t go bankrupt paying for hosting’ point of view, but also extremely timely given the recent PHP exploit which infected major hosting companies, the rise of malicious software on Facebook, and a whole host of other things which are making digital security incredibly important.

And last, but definitely not least – if you head over to Online Race Driver, the great new guide to online racing I run in conjunction with some fellow virtual petrolheads, you should spot a fantastic new logo on the site. It was done by the fantastic designers at Jigowatt, and they did a fantastic job of referencing classic motorsport logos/colours, and then producing something which works in the different ways needed for a digital logo. (Disclosure – many of the team are former colleagues, and friends, of mine).

They do pretty much everything, but are particularly good with WordPress, which could well come in handy!

Plus, a new map pack came out for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, which is still the most addictive videogame experience I’ve had in a long time. Fatherhood is still a surprising and amazing thing which delights me on a daily basis. And there’s still the part of my day spent working at an innovative and fast-moving radio and digital business.

But I have some more cunning plans….

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A couple of weeks of catching up…

June 4, 2010 By

Life is has been a bit hectic over the last couple of weeks, with three conferences, a new sponsor, and a new logo for ORD amongst other things….

So in the past 2 weeks I’ve been at The Specialist Media Show (hosting a roundtable), The Open Mobile Summit (As a guest of Nokia), and M-Publishing (hosting another round table).

It’s been really interesting to see the differences with 3 events in such close proximity. The Specialist Media Show launched this year with the first event in Peterborough, attracting a lot of print publishers who have an enormous amount of knowledge in their specialist areas, but are generally still a bit nervous about digital, and intrigued but curious about mobile.

It was really good to chat to a lot of people who have the passion and knowledge of global niche subjects to result in successful digital businesses, and I think the conference helped a few of them find a stronger resolve to drive ahead with digital.

The next day’s Open Mobile Summit was a world apart as it provides a platform for a lot of senior people and big names in mobile – unfortunately I could only attend for one day, but there were definitely a number of brilliant talks and panel discussions. I went from being the only person checking in on Fourquare in Peterborough to sitting near the founder of Gowalla in 24 hours! And it was good to chat more to the Nokia team and find out more about what they have planned – they’re definitely not standing still..

And then came M-Publishing – which as a mobile event concentrating on publishing was extremely focused, pretty fast-moving, and very valuable to anyone producing text/video/audio content and hoping to mobilise and monetise it. Really interesting talks and debates, and a lot of fairly honest and open discussion about what has worked and what might not have succeeded in the mobile space.

I think the main thing out of all of this is that a growing number of people in traditional content are starting to get their heads around digital. I might have spent 5-10 years complaining about how reluctant they were, and there’s still a massive way to go for many of them, but I really do think they’re starting to change – possibly inspired the most by the lure of the iPhone/iPad/iTunes route. And it’s going to push digital companies to innovate even faster, which is going to be interesting.

You may notice a lovely animated banner on here and 140char.com – Bullguard, and their internet security products, which is not only good from a ‘I won’t go bankrupt paying for hosting’ point of view, but also extremely timely given the recent PHP exploit which infected major hosting companies, the rise of malicious software on Facebook, and a whole host of other things which are making digital security incredibly important.

And last, but definitely not least – if you head over to Online Race Driver, the great new guide to online racing I run in conjunction with some fellow virtual petrolheads, you should spot a fantastic new logo on the site. It was done by the fantastic designers at Jigowatt, and they did a fantastic job of referencing classic motorsport logos/colours, and then producing something which works in the different ways needed for a digital logo. (Disclosure – many of the team are former colleagues, and friends, of mine).

They do pretty much everything, but are particularly good with WordPress, which could well come in handy!

Plus, a new map pack came out for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, which is still the most addictive videogame experience I’ve had in a long time. Fatherhood is still a surprising and amazing thing which delights me on a daily basis. And there’s still the part of my day spent working at an innovative and fast-moving radio and digital business.

But I have some more cunning plans….

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A rather busy week…

May 16, 2010 By

It’s Sunday evening, and I’m staring down the barrel of 725 unread items in Google Reader, pondering why I haven’t organised any food, and yet feeling like I should make the most of relaxing for an hour or two before the new week begins.

The good kind of busy has been happening at work, as the whole team at Absolute Radio have been doing more than ever before. If you’re interested in whether or not it works, check out the latest stats and on-demand listening figures. It includes the nice news that 713,000 Absolute Radio applications have now been downloaded to mobile phones, and people used them to listen to 215,000 hours of live audio (mobile development is one of the things I’m heavily involved in).

And to illustrate how fast the company continues to move, on Friday Absolute 80s became a national station on DAB, and we announced a new station, Absolute Radio 90s.

And that’s just some of stuff being worked on…

Meanwhile outside of work, I had the uncomfortable experience of having 2 out of my 3 sites comprimised by the PHP exploit which did the rounds of a number of hosting services.

For updates, and info if you’re affected, I recommend the Securi SecurityWPSecurityLock blog (which includes a great script to easily solve the immediate problem), and the blog (which has some handy guides to backing up and reinstalling your database and content). I hadn’t looked at either site before or heard their names mentioned, but after reading up and using their tools, I’m quite impressed – and both sites offer ongoing WordPress security products I’ve made a mental note to check out.

So all three sites have been tweaked and had clean installs uploaded after some backing-up.

Add in a poorly child (thankfully better now), and Chelsea doing a historic double (Winning the Premiership and FA Cup), and it’ll explain why updates might take a while to get back up to their regular schedule!

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