Firstly, if you're subscribed to my "stuff" via Posterous, its been moved to http://www.alonswartz.org/stuff/. This is my last post on Posterous, so please re-subscribe via RSS or email.

I really liked Posterous, and tried to move my full personal website to the service, but I just couldn't. I felt too constrained, took too much time, and couldn't do what I wanted without implementing stupid hacks. Eventually, I gave up.

Reasons why I made the move:

• It's too slow. Loading this Posterous with 5 posts takes 18 seconds vs. 4 seconds on my new site (before optimizations).
• Custom theming is too time consuming, and requires a different server for theme images.
• Embedded javascript is not supported. It's been talked about and promised for ages, just hasn't happened (yes, I know you can use iframes).
• Web-posting doesn't support markdown, or a preview option. Editing a posts styling is pain.
• There is no way to display auto-generated recent or popular posts.
• Post and page slugs can't be changed, ever (this post is an example of that).
• Page URL slugs require the /pages prefix.

Don't get me wrong, Posterous is really useful if you post via email which is what it was designed for, and the reason I started using the service. But in reality I rarely used the email feature as it didn't make sense for my use case.

I hope Posterous will fix these issues in future, but for now I just want to say thanks.