richard mackney

Most popular posts

Sometimes working with Posterous is a little bit like working on Blogger in 1999. OK, maybe it's not that bad, but what I mean is that Posterous has some amazing features not found anywhere else, but it still limits functions which you would readily find on most blogging platforms today.

This is actually refreshing as it presents a challenge. I have no doubt that Posterous will be releasing features left, right and centre, but for now it's hack time.

"Most Popular Posts"

With the linear function of Posterous, sometimes interesting posts or most visited posts may get lost in the time line. So I have used the autopost function to Delicious to create a list of popular posts for me.

1. Create a new Delicious account, or use an existing one.
2. Autopost each post to this new account, but also set a tag in the subject ((tags: Popular)).
3. Use the Delicious Link Roll feature to display all posts with the tag: Popular.
4. Embed this Javascript somewhere other that Posterous (as they don't support Javascript yet).
5. Run the script, copy the output and bang that into Posterous as a post, or in a custom theme.
6. Alternately use an iframe to display the page.
7. Update Delicious with new tags as you go.

The output makes an easy (but not automated) way of grabbing a list of posts with introductions, if required:

Most Popular:

• Beerswap beers have landed
  
  I finally managed to collect my beerswap parcel on my third attempt and after opening the box tonight all the dellivery issues were instant history. What a great selection of beer from four Brewer ...
• AA battery emergency iPhone charger
  
  I looked at the iGo PowerXtender in August and thought it was quite a nice emergency power product for the iPhone - it was
• Wine Notes iPhone app
  
  See the full gallery on posterous Since I took part in Twitter Taste Live (Wine) and recently the ongoing #Beerswap I
• Innis and Gunn IPA Perfect Pour
  
  Slight change of format tonight ... a bit of a vlog. Don
• Photography for BrawnGP F1 Winners
  
  I've written a blog post for the PhotoBlog on Mackney Photography and just wanted mention and link to it here ...As you may know I work with the Formula One Champions Brawn GP through my Derby based ...
• BeerSwap - The Selection
  
  While everyone else involved in #BeerSwap is off tonight for the start of the Wetherspoon Real Ale Festival I am selecting and packing my beers for #BeerSwap. I'm obvously not going to let the cat o ...
• Brewing Beer at Nutbrook Brewery
  
  Once upon a time I bought a selection of local beers and made some Stout Cakeswith a stout called 'Midnight' by Nutbrook Brewery. As per the usual, I blogged about it and took a couple of snaps. Th ...
• Things you should setup on Posterous
  
  Most users of Posterous will have already optimised the tools and settings provided and performed all of the usual tasks when setting up a new Posterous ... If you haven't then here is my list of t ...
• Customising Posterous
  
  Posterous is getting new features all the time and I'm sure they already have a massive 'wish list' from their users, so instead of adding to that list I've made a few tweaks to the default dark the ...
• iGo PowerXtender
  
  I've been looking around for emergency power solutions for my iPhone for a while and have been trying to find a solution that uses AA batteries. I've seen a couple of home brew options (The MintyBoost ...
• Mobile Blogging with the iPhone
  
  I'm traveling soon and wanted to make sure I could post to the ammoboxproject while on the move, so this evening I have quickly downloaded and tested four iPhone apps for mobile blogging and sent a te ...
• BEER from BEERmerchants.com
  
  Today I had a package of BEER delivered by BEERmerchants.com. We filmed the opening! and here is the raw unedited 720p - straight from SD card footage. (Sorry for the out of focus camera work, the aut ...
• Twitter Taste Live
  
  (foreword: this blog post will update throughout the day, so please refresh for the latest post)I'm quite excited! ... it's nearly 2pm and I'm looking forward to a live UK wine tasting event that I am ...
• Touring Caravan Kit
  
  So at the start of 2009 I've been thinking about last year and the touring Caravan we bought in March 2008. We have been thinking about where we might go in 2009 and what extra kit we might need.When ...
• Shared Hosting and SAN Servers
  
  Re-seller hosting account:Once upon a time in early 2001, I signed up with Fasthosts and offered website hosting as a re-seller on a shared server with hundreds of other websites. The sites were manag ...

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My other sites in Posterous

In the Posterous settings you have the ability to autopost to a growing list of 'other sites' and once you enable them they will show up as a list of icons. However, adding any of these sites means that they will get autoposted to whenever you send an email to post@posterous.com so if you don't want this to happen, the best way (for now) is to add them to your advanced theme manually.

You just need to add your own custom html code directly after this bit of code:

<h5>My Other Sites</h5>
{ProfileExternalLinks}

And If you view the source code of this post you can grab the code I have created to create your own 'other sites' icons. Just remember to link to your own profiles and not mine!

If it helps, or saves you 20 mins then let me know by leaving a comment and link to your custom Posterous ...

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Photos taken with iPhone and sent to Posterous

When I post to this Posterous blog, it's usually done with the iPhone. I've found that it's really easy to take a pic or a video and type a short paragraph of text and send it on it's way using either mobile data or WiFi. This is generally spur of the moment and means I'm not restrained to downloading photos from my SLR and having to find a desktop or a laptop to make a post.

Posterous has made photoblogging, lifestreaming and moblogging very easy for anyone who doesn't have the tech knowledge to use or constantly update a self hosted blog, and with a few choice autoposts it can be backed up or shared instantly with other communities. 

Here is a selection of the 'live' autoposts that made it onto my flickr account, which I try and keep to the more interesting or images with a better quality .... 

I currently use the flickr API to pull in sets or tags and display the results as html, from there the html is used in Posterous. The photo's can even load into a popup lightbox pulling the large image straight from flickr.

Let me know what you think ...

Related posts on richard.mackney.com

• Embedding flickr photos with php

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Things you should setup on Posterous

Most users of Posterous will have already optimised the tools and settings provided and performed all of the usual tasks when setting up a new Posterous ...

If you haven't then here is my list of things that I need to remember when setting up a new Posterous ...

• Decide if you would like http://yourname.posterous.com or a custom domain name http://yourname.com and set-up the A record.
• Add your selected domain name into Google webmaster tools.
• Grab the webmaster tools verification meta data and add it to the head of your Posterous theme.
  eg <meta name="google-site-verification" content="***********************" />
• Grab your Posterous rss feed url and submit it as a site map in webmaster tools
  eg http://richard.mackney.com/rss.xml
• Burn your feed with Google Feedburner and enter the new url into Posterous settings.
  eg http://feeds.feedburner.com/mackney
• Create the code for a headline animator in Feedburner (just for fun ;)
• Setup Google Analytics and enter the ID into the Posterous settings.

And here are a few operational things for using Posterous ...

• Use the email address: posterous@posterous.com and this will not autopost to any of your other sites.
• Use the email address: private@posterous.com to create hidden posts to review later.
• Check out all the email configurations and save them as contacts.
  eg twitter+posterous@posterous.com
• Use #end to finish an email post and avoid posting any signature. 
• Add tags to the subject of the email.
  eg ((tag: iPhone, Photo)) 
• Consider using Gmail to write posts and attach files ... utilise the autosave function. 
• Subscribe to your own Posterous to get a daily digest of your own posts for archiving locally. 
• Setup your autopost functions to act as a site backup.
  eg http://richardmackney.blogspot.com is a locked archive of all my posts. 
• Think about using a site scraping/downloading utility such as http://www.httrack.com as a static backup.

If you found any of this useful, let me know :)

Related posts from richard.mackney.com

• Customising Posterous
• Things you should setup on Posterous
• Handy widgets and badges

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Customising Posterous

Posterous is getting new features all the time and I'm sure they already have a massive 'wish list' from their users, so instead of adding to that list I've made a few tweaks to the default dark theme while I wait for the features to appear :)

Firstly, I'd like my own "favicon" or "shortcut icon" and the easiest way to do this is to download the one I use on tumblr, host the image myself and add the following code to the head of the advanced theme option:

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://mackney.com/richard/profile/img/avatar_16.png">

Secondly, I like viewing my Posterous on my iPhone, so I've set the zoom (initial scale) to show the main content on the left and enlarged:

<meta content='width=device-width; initial-scale=0.4; maximum-scale=1.0;' name='viewport'/> 

and, made a link to the icon I would like to appear on the iPhone homepage if adding my site as a bookmark:

<link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/225657/twitter-avatar-small.png" /> 

The next thing I wanted was a sitemap. I'm sure this will be coming soon, but I wanted stuff to be found without having to use the tags as I don't always tag my content. I've added the RSS feedburner feed into webmaster tools to ensure all new posts get indexed by Google, but for historic posts I've created a simple static sitemap as a post which will have to be updated manually. 

I've inserted this into the TAGS list by adding:

<li style="font-size:0;">Sitemap</li>

Related posts from richard.mackney.com

• Customising Posterous
• Things you should setup on Posterous
• Handy widgets and badges

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Ding Ding, All Change

Here is a marker .... 

After testing Posterous for a while, I've decided to simplify stuff ....

http://richard.mackney.com and http://blog.mackney.com now point here. One place for all my crap.

If you don't get it, Just forget it.

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Using the PicPosterous iPhone app

I do really like the PicPosterous iPhone app as I will usually always be adding an image or a video. It's nice to be able to upload multiple images in one post to create a gallery. It's a bit quirky in the way that you have to name 'albums' to get the title of the post.

Hopefully in a updated release they may allow for just adding text? The functionality is obviously here (as I'm writing this on the iPhone).

It would also be nice to be able to select which services to autopost to, as currently it's all or none. I know this can be done by selecting which email address to send it to, but email and SMTP just pee's me off.

I'd also like to upload at different resolutions by selecting from a list when uploading.

Not much then ... ;)

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Just testing twittelator post directly to Posterous

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Handy widgets and badges

There are loads of sites on the net that offer badges and widgets. Some offer them for their own services and some offer aggregation of multiple services. I've placed a few that I use below - if nothing else it's handy as a reference point for me to easily find the scripts for my own widget codes.

Now that I am using Posterous, things are slightly limited and we have to go back to old skool methods of embeding widgets, either as images or using an iframe as Posterous does not support Javascript. Scroll down as this page may get longer and longer each time I find an interesting widget. View the source code to grab any iframe links.

You can use these in Posterous posts, but you can also design them into your Posterous advanced theme.

As you can see from above, this is a tweetmeme widget that uses an iframe. This can be added manually to the Posterous post (if you feel your post is re-tweetable!) or you can design it into your custom theme and have it appear on all posts by using the Posterous code: {Permalink} as can be seen on my test Posterous.

This is a nice one by Feedburner that uses a rotating .gif

This FriendFeed banner will display content from all the services added

Here is a Facebook static image, that updates status.

FriendFeed badge

And here is a LifeStream image from FriendFeed

12seconds.tv widget (flash in iframe) ...

Mobypicture (flash embed)

Tweetmeme Chicklet

Facebook page badge (using a Facebook hosted iframe)

These are Facebook page embeds - but you need to host them

This is a self designed 'TwitterTicker'

This is another self designed 'TwitterTicker'

This is a self designed recent post list that uses the Posterous RSS feed

This is a self hosted twitter search

This is a self hosted twitter widget

This is a self designed most interesting images from flickr iframe, using the flickr API

Stay tuned for more as I find them / use them :)

Related posts from richard.mackney.com

• Customising Posterous
• Things you should setup on Posterous
• Handy widgets and badges

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