With Posterous shutting their doors, I’m finally motivated to reexamine the web space I don’t really maintain. The whole point of choosing posterous was to have a minimal barrier to posting. To that extent, the string of short-text-plus-images posts proves the format effective. In search of a replacement, I’m not excited about anything I’ve found. However, since finishing the book, I have a number of ideas and half-writings to share. So, it’s time to make something work.

Jekyll + GitHub Pages looks like the hacker thing to do. The amount of work involved in creating a site with Jekyll turned into more web hacking than I’m interested in. I want something that requires I simply bring my content; I don’t want to worry about anything else. Still, I like the way Jekyll makes it easy to use a humane text format for writing. As much as the geek in me wants to use org-mode for all things, I’ve come to like markdown for the simplicity in what it does.

For now, I’m trying out Octopress. It uses Jekyll under the hood, thus gives me markdown, and ships with a layout out of the box. I’m terrified of the pile of ruby I need installed locally to make it work, but that will work for the time being. The default posterous import tool completely ignored my images and hosted files. I’ll have to dig into that business later.

Thanks you Posterous for a pretty good product and thank you for having the courtesy to let us pull a backup before turning out the lights.