Posterous is Closing up Shop
With Posterous shutting downtheir servers for good, it was about time that I figured out a way to archive and migrate over to another platform. Enter Tumblr, the leading free blogging platform that we all have come to love. The problem with migrating hundreds of posts from one host to another is that you have to deal with pagination. When a visitor navigates to a website it is highly unlikely that they will navigate into the archives of pagination, and will usually only press “next page” a handfull of times.
The solution? Change the way users navigate a website and make it easier for them to scan articles and images. Vertical scrolling is the standard, but it is definitely not the quickest way of navigating through a large number of posts.
By downloading the archive of my Posterous site I was able to sort out all 500+ posts and their associated content. Using the Google Maps API I created a simple proof of concept landing page that would display every post from 2008 to 2011 as a “super collage.” In doing so, users can now go through years worth of posts quickly and zoom into articles which they find interesting.
This was a fun weekend project that was relatively easy to accomplish.
You can view the proof of concept here