Posterpress

Posterous is a great platform for publishing (and autoposting). The main inconvenient is that it's not free software and there is no way to host it yourself (though you can use a custom domain). So the goal here is to see how Wordpress could be tweaked to work as (much as) Posterous.

Posterous features

A short list of Posteorus features that I find useful and would need in Posterpress.

Post by mail

Bookmarklet for post by web

Tags

Autopost to

Twitter (with short url and hashtags for tags)

Identica (with short url and hashtags for tags)

Facebook

Markdown

Google Analytics

Wordpress features and plugins

So Wordpress support tags already and has a bookmarklet for a quick posting from any webpage: http://codex.wordpress.org/Press_This

So for the other features, here's a list of wordpress plugins that might help or do the job.

Markdown

http://michelf.com/projects/php-markdown/ Requires to deactivate the wordpress default editor. It might not be so usefull anymore since Postie has also some special “function tags”

Google analytics

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-analytics-for-wordpress/ ← A lot more features than what posterous proposes

Post by mail

http://codex.wordpress.org/Post_to_your_blog_using_email ← default wordpress feature.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/postie/ ← has more features and works similarly to what Posterous does. It's also possible to comment your own posts by mail.

Autopost

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/network-publisher/ does it all through 3rd party called LinksAlpha.com. (Actually, it might not be necessary to use that plugin anymore. I used it without it. Couldn't make the API key work.) So LinksAlpha checks your wordpress rss feeds every half hour and autoposts any new item to your social media of choice. And there is an impresive list of supported websites. The site works as expected but with some annoying things for me: Twitter, Identica and Facebook are free of charge but if you want to publish on Goole Buzz for example, there is a fee (so one might ask: how long will they keep it all free?). Second, it doesn't do an instant autopost. It'll do it when it will fetch your Rss (might be solved with pubhubsubblabla, haven't tried it), and last, it's third party again. The whole point of moving from Posterous to a self hosted Wordpress is trying to avoid third parties… But appart from those, it's really easy to set up and avoids the pain of installing lots of different plugins to achieve something similar.

Facebook

https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wpbook/ ← prefered as you control your FB application. But requires to get FB Dev API key.

https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordbooker/ ← Easy to set up but uses an app controlled by someone else.

Twitter

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-to-twitter

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/twitter-tools/ ← Choose this one so I coud make it work with identica. Easy install anyway. Just a bit tricky on the twitter side because an app registration is needed.

Identica

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/twitter-tools-statusnet/ needs Twitter tools to work.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/identica-tools/ Old plugin… not much info

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordidentica/ Old one too

Shorturls

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/twitter-friendly-links/ ← Get a nice short url for each posts. Works with Twitter-tools (but needs to activate it in the settings)

Importer

And once you've configured it all, all you need to do is import what you had in your posterous and save it in your wordpress.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/posterous-importer/

Extras

Just some stuff not directly related to a posterous conversion.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/configurable-tag-cloud-widget/ ← an nice little tool that gives more option to create a Tags display widget with a lot of options. (but needed to hack the code so it would display correctly in wp3.1)