So I've decided to actually use posterous as my blogging platform. While my day job certainly has hosting options, I'm not fast enough to keep up with the wordpress security issues and I've lost a number of wordpress installations to evil hacking kiddies over the years. Sure, there're a handful of installable options, and then of course many hosted services (wordpress.com, blogger, etc...) but this seemed to be the best fit for me, personally. Interestingly, I found a very cool post on uptime for most of the popular services by Pingdom. While doing my research, I found a TON of cool tips and tricks about posterous which I figured I'd go ahead and post for all to consume, go me! Without further ado, here're the tips, tricks, and simply cool stuff!

Use a custom domain with Posterous, blogjazzle with some bling!

Yes, it's true, you can host this using your own domain, and it'll WORK! Basically, you point your domain A record at their server, and boom you've got a domain going... (you do have to configure a few things on their side though). This blog is available on both http://blog.eefy.net and http://eefy.posterous.com (which redirects). For more infromation see the posterous page on custom domains. This's the setting section you're looking for:

After playing around with this from my iPhone (if someone wants to post me an android, feel free ;) and I'll blog about that too...) I found it pretty easy to post quick links and information super easily, and it was up fast! Here're the links to the Android, and iPhone versions.

Integrate Google Analytics, to know stuffs

If you want more info (which you do, you really do) about who does what on your site, google analytics is the way to go. The great part is that it's stupidly easy to get Google Analytics into your posterous site. All you need to do is sign up, create a site, and add the site ID, and boom, there you go! Here's the link to the posterous page on Analytics

Integrate FeedBurner, without MyBrand/Custom Domains :(

Usually, RSS doesn't give you the kind of stats you want, but FeedBurner (now a google product) does! It's pretty easy, and think of it as a high speed cache layer for your RSS feed. They essentially fetch the feed, add some stats, and deliver it to your customers. It's pretty easy to get going, simply go to the same place that you setup Google Analytics and select FeedBurner instead of analytics. There's a catch though... While they support feedburner, at thet ime of writing this article they did *not* support FeedBurner MyBrand (essentially custom domains for your FeedBurner). While I've set this up, I may have to hack it into the theme at some point to use it. Here's the link to the posterous page on Analytics

Use autoposting, because, you're lazy like me, right?

AutoPost is something that Posterous has pretty much down. When you write a post on posterous, you can have it automatically push that post to Facebook, Twitter, etc... (it'll shorten URL's if it has to, and do the needful) all automatically. The great thing is you can actually specific that for some posts, to not distribute these posts to specific places (like with E-Mail posts for example). It's a great feature that I haven't used much yet, but from what I've seen so far, I'm eager to start! Here's the link to the posterous page on AutoPosting

Markup Languages in your Posts, GitHub gist posts, and other stuff (TrailerAddict)... Geeks rejoice!

So want to put code on your Posterous? Want to post your GitHub gists? Well, now you're in luck!!! Read these two posts:

• http://blog.posterous.com/announcing-markdown-support
• http://blog.posterous.com/posterous-now-supports-traileraddict-embeds-a
  

Use #end, it's the right way to do email posting

When sending an email post, sometimes you'll get your annoying signature (or in the case of some of our day jobs, someone elses annoying signature) tacked on the end. The easiest way to ensure that these don't hit your posterous is to add a "#end" to the email after you've finished writing your piece. This'll allow posterous to truncate anything after that, yay! There're a few other cool tips on their E-Mail posting tips page.

Drafts, Save me! Previews, etc... yes, they exist (don't believe the folks who say otherwise)

So while not very intuitive, they do actually exist. While editing, save your post, and then return to the "Space Settings" section using the top right hand corner 'Spaces' button. Once there, pull down the menu and view on website. See image below for the section I'm talking about:

 GeoTagged Pictures, Google Maps!

A cool little feature is that when posting from your iPhone or Android, if you're using a reasonable version of the phone OS software and have your phone GPS turned on, your photos should automatically end up with google maps information on the post!! 

Export your current blog seamlessly... Because you know you want to!

I didn't use this feature, but you may, read up some more about this at the following URL :

• http://posterous.com/switch

All in all, I'm pretty happy with the service so far. Feel free to comment anything cool that you've found that you want me to add!