Migrating from Posterous to WordPress

For the past few years I have used a site on posterous.  I liked posterous easy approach to posting via the web or e-mail and it’s ability to display photo albums.  Add to that the iOS and Android apps it was a great place to easily post, and not spread photos around a variety of services (twitpic, twitter, yfrog and others).

Then came the acquisition by twitter and the vague acquisition FAQ which makes it clear that at some point they will shut the service down.  This is when I decided it was time to stop adding more content to a site that eventually would have to move.

To migrate my content I used the Posterous Importer for WordPress (if you are hosted on wordpress.com it is there by default on self hosted you need to install).   I imported my posts to a new WordPress installation, and moved them all to a new category named ‘Posterous’.  On this blog I configured the same category and excluded it from my RSS feed to prevent spamming twitter and facebook when I imported them.   The WordPress to WordPress move took minutes to complete.

Not all of the images and videos embedded on Posterous moved correctly to fix the broken ones I enabled downloading on my Posterous site (Space Settings, Privacy Settings)

Checking the Show download links for media box, this allowed me to easily download all the original content and easily import it in to WordPress.

I probably could have waited a bit longer to see if they created a better export tool, but the existing tools worked well enough, and I now have all of my posts in one place.