Posterous is set to shut down on April 30th. For the past month, I’ve been dreading the move from Posterous to whatever.
Today I bit the bullet and decided to migrate my Posterous blog to Jekyll. There are many reasons I chose Jekyll – independence from free hosted services is probably the biggest reason.
I chose to use Octopress, which extends Jekyll with a set of sane defaults and a good structure for customizing layout, CSS, etc.
To migrate the Posterous blog posts, first I downloaded an archive from the Posterous website. Inside the downloaded zip file, there is a wordpress_export_1.xml file, which Jekyll knows how to import.
Lastly, I chose to download all Posterous-hosted images, because I expect that Twitter might not host Posterous assets on Amazon S3 forever. Better safe than sorry. Here is the script that I used to do that work:
Yay, now my blog isn’t at the mercy of big corporations deciding how to make more money. Never mind that I just embedded a Gist above :-)
Note: I later realized all the images were in the original zip file I downloaded from Posterous. But odly, the filenames were a bit different and the wordpress xml file didn’t link to them.