Last month, Twitter announced that they had purchased Posterous, the site that I use to host my blog.  I found this a little alarming, since in the months after Twitter acquired another popular product, TweetDeck, they slowly gutted it of all of the useful features.  However, Posterous assured us that the site would continue to operate normally, and if any decision was made to change the service, there would be plenty of advanced notice.  Well, it seems that Posterous is rapidly headed for the same fate as TweetDeck.

My blog is mostly a hobby blog.  I originally started it as a place to post some thoughts that didn’t quite fit into a 140 character tweet, but it slowly evolved into a location to post commentary on technical problems I had solved, often at the intersection of technology and family.  It was also a place to post relatively deep technical solutions to problems I had solved that didn’t have clear solutions readily available on Google searches.

The majority of traffic to my blog comes from Google.  There are a couple of posts that generate a lot of traffic in particular (connecting iOS devices to a Bose wave radio and problems with DNS resolution for Akamai), and my post on babysitting over skype even led to my kids being featured in a New York Times article.  I use Google Analytics to track what posts are being found by various keywords, and starting last week, I noticed something very disturbing:

Traffic had dropped off to close to 0.

I started googling around, and my blog had more less disappeared off of Google.  Even googling “Jeremy Rothman-Shore Blog” failed to bring it up.  On April 11, Posterous had run into some sort DNS issue, and anyone with a posterous.com site had been knocked out.

Okay, sure, technical issues happen.  But what is particularly disturbing is that Posterous was silent about it.  Many of us out on Twitter were complaining, but Posterous was not responding.  In the past few occasions that I had run into a technical issue, I always found posterous to be very responsive, but there has been nothing but silence for almost a week now.  They haven’t even acknowledged an issue.

Forced to take matters into my own hands, I started looking for an alternative site.  I experimented briefly with Tumblr, another up-and-coming blogging platform, but I found that it was just too limited and missing many of the customization and integration options that I had come to expect from Posterous.  Wordpress, on the other hand, was a much more full featured site with many of the features I was already using.  Best of all, it had an “Import from Posterous” option.  I pressed a button, and 15 minutes later, every single one of my posts had been imported from Posterous, complete with tags, images, code snipets, and videos.

I will continue to settle in over the next few weeks here at my new WordPress home.  My apologies for possible “noise” posts while I work out issues with autoposting to other services like Twitter and Facebook.