We're proud to announce a brand new theming engine and 3 new built-in themes. 

Modern (shown above) is a simple new responsive theme with updated fonts and typography that will be the new default for new blogs you create on Posthaven. [Github]

Lanyon is a theme that we adapted for use on Posthaven from the open source Jekyll blog theme created by Mark Otto. [Github]

Ilun is a dark theme created by Posthaven cofounder Brett Gibson. [Github]

Of course the original classic Posthaven theme [Github] will remain for all blogs created thus far. We also created a minimal theme [Github] that is helpful for new theme creators who want something with as little CSS styling as possible. 

How to use Themes now

On your dashboard, just click the new Themes tab in Site Settings:

If you scroll down, you'll see Available themes. Just click "Preview" to see a preview of what your blog would look like with that theme, or "Use" to switch to it now.

How to customize or write your own themes

All of our themes come standard with support for SCSS using rake. You can also upload any image, fonts, or other assets using our command line tool. The theme engine is built using the very battle-tested Liquid gem created by Shopify. 

It's an advanced feature for folks who already know HTML and CSS and know their way around a text editor and command line. 

Here's a quick preview of how easy it is to get going from the command line:

Ready to go? Read the docs to get started. 

Thanks again for your ongoing support. 

We are getting quite close to releasing themes for Posthaven. We have all sites running on our new theming engine and now need to finish up the new themes we are working on to make theming useful for everyone.

If you are among our more technical users (i.e. you know your way around the command line and know HTML and CSS), and would like to try building your own Posthaven theme get in touch at help@posthaven.com and we will get you started.

You've asked for it and it's here. Search on every Posthaven blog. Try it now from the homepage of any blog, in the sidebar:

Search on the archive page is actually 100% realtime thanks to the amazing Algolia Search API, which is the underlying service we use to deliver such a lighting fast feature. 

More from us shortly, but enjoy and let us know if you run into any problems.

Happy New Year, Posthavenites. Theme engine efforts continue, with an initial internal alpha already done. More on that is coming. In the meantime, we're doing some new years cleaning and fixed a bunch of bugs. 

Maintaining software is a lot like gardening — you've got to remember sweep and weed alongside your major landscaping projects too. 

• Strikethrough — Now you can click the Strikethrough button in the post editor which can be handy for lists you might be keeping. 
• Private post bugs — We saw some confusion around when a private post would get published. We've made that much more clear by making the primary action on private posts say "Save Private Post" so you'll always know exactly what you're doing.  
• Facebook Share button — It's official! The Share button is better for blog posts in terms of social media optimization. Posts show up better in Facebook when it's a share, and people are more likely to add their own comments to their timeline. It's a better experience for mobile too. So we've ditched the Like button and switched to Share 100%. 
• Horizontal scroll bugs on mobile — Commenting and browsing on mobile should work better now that we worked through some glitches that would cause a horizontal scroll on mobile views of blog posts.

As always if you hit any bugs or have further requests, let us know at help@posthaven.com. We really appreciate the support.  

_{Photo via halfrain}

Hello from the Posthaven team. Don't worry, we're still tending to the site. We've been adding little things that might be hard to notice so we thought we'd call out a bunch of them out. 

Switch posts between blogs — You can now click Post Settings on a post you're editing and switch the blog. This was an oft-requested feature we just didn't get to early on, but is pretty obvious that you'd want it when you think about it. 

Export — Your content is yours, so you can switch whenever you want. While logged in, just visit https://posthaven.com/exports and you can easily export any of your Posthaven blogs to Wordpress format. 

The stuff above is ready to rock, so try it out. We've also got a few things on deck that we'd like to share with you. Here's what's coming next...

Theming — We're working with friends of ours at Viget Labs to bring a world-class theme engine based on Shopify's Liquid gem. That's in progress and we expect to be able to have an early version of it in early 2015, along with a few new looks. The best part of it is you'll be able to use full HTML, CSS, and even HAML/SASS. 

Commenting improvements — We'll be doing more on commenting, letting you selectively close posts for comment, as well as letting your commenters login using Facebook/Twitter. 

Thanks for your support and for sticking with Posthaven. We will do you proud. 

We're still hard at work getting themes ready for Posthaven sites, but in the meantime we've added a way to change the look and feel of your site for advanced users. If you know CSS you can now add CSS code to all the pages on your site. Find it on the Advanced tab in your site's settings on the dashboard:

A quick note about a small feature I just deployed: now on the dashboard when you edit your Posthaven profile you can upload a picture to go along with your name and bio.

Right now these show up below your bio in the sidebar on your site.

We're happy to announce Posthaven now supports multiple contributors per blog.

On your Posthaven dashboard in the settings for your site you will now find a "Contributors" tab where you can add and manage contributors. The owner of each email you add will be able create new posts on your site via email right away. They will also have the option to create a free contributor-only Posthaven account so that they can post via the web and edit their posts on your site.

Contributors who create an account and add a name to their profile will be listed on your blog and have their posts attributed to them. See this in action on our blog and on this post.

Let us know what you think at help@posthaven.com.

We're happy to announce that we've launched a feature many of you have been asking for — Email subscriptions for new posts on your blogs.

Now your blog readers can easily enter their email address to start receiving new posts in their inbox. See the link in the sidebar on your blog's homepage or below each post on that post's page:

Even more, in each site's Settings section on dashboard you can manage subscribers and add email addresses of family and friends to make sure they stay up to date on your blog without having to check it manually:

Finally, it's even easier as a Posthaven user because you can follow other Posthaven blogs and start getting updates with one click.

While you're at it, don't forget to subscribe to this Posthaven too (just below, see "Like this post?") — it's the easiest way for you to get notified whenever we add new features, which we are working furiously to deliver to you asap.

As always, keep in touch at help@posthaven.com.

Now you can autopost to LinkedIn profiles. Just go to your Settings > Autopost tab and click LinkedIn to hook up your account:

We've also updated the post editor so that you can easily change the display date of a post using your local time zone, which is automatically detected from your computer. The date also appears on the post URL in the sidebar, automatically set to the correct time for your blog reader based on their current time zone as well. 

New features are coming as soon as we can write them. Thanks for your continued support!

Here's a quick post to highlight a few smaller features we've added that didn't merit full blog posts. 

Comment By Email

When you get a comment notification email now you can reply to that email to create a new comment and keep the conversation going. We needed to make sure this was in place as part of our current effort to get email subscribers and multiple contributor support ready.

Advanced Site Settings

When you got to "Settings" for you site you will now see an "Advanced" tab where we have added a few things users have been asking for. Here are a couple highlights:

• Google Analytics integration. Get a free account with Google Analytics and add your tracking ID to get better data about who is visiting your Posthaven blog.
• Per site profiles. If you have multiple sites and do not want them all using your main Posthaven profile identity you can use this to override the name and bio that get displayed on a per site basis.

It's back to work for us. As always get in touch at help@posthaven.com with comments, questions or to say hello.

This just in, as requested—Tweet and Like buttons at the bottom of your posts. These appear only for your public blogs, and can be turned off easily by just going to your Site Settings. 

We've got some much bigger releases for you shortly. Thanks for your continued support!

We've been working hard getting new features to you as soon as we can. Here's the latest — we've added the ability for your visitors to leave comments. You'll get email notifications when they do comment, and you can turn these off by editing your email settings (either click the link in the email, or go to Dashboard > Your Account) 

Notifications
We'll be adding daily digests for comments as soon as we can. For now, you'll be able to either get your comment notifications immediately, or you can turn them off. 

Built-in anti-spam
Anyone can leave a comment by default, but we do run anti-spam software so that you don't get lots of annoying spam comments. The worst your real visitors will see when trying to comment will be a captcha, powered by Recaptcha, but we only do that if we think the comment looks like spam. 

What's next for commenting?
In addition to daily / weekly comment digests, over the coming days we'll be adding Facebook / Twitter login, the ability to close comments automatically if the posts are old, e.g. 90 days (which will be configurable), and comment-by-email (once post by email is ready).

Easily disable commenting
Don't want commenting? No worries. You can turn it off by going to your Site Settings and just set it to disabled:

Upvotes
We also introduced a new concept: Upvotes. This was the same as "favorites" from Posterous, and if you have imported faves, they'll automatically show up as upvotes now. We were inspired by Reddit, and upvotes are always nice gestures that show people that as readers, you care. No login is required to do an upvote, so it's a great way to give people some love for their posts. Try it on this one. =)

Thanks again for your support. We'll keep shipping these features as soon as we can.

I just deployed a small but helpful feature. As part of my efforts toward getting post by email ready I added in automatic expansion of URLs into their related embed codes. 

Instead of tracking down embed codes from other sites just try pasting the URL of the content on its own line in the body of your post. After you save we'll do our best to look up the URL and expand it into an embed code for you. It's great for stuff like video embeds, audio embeds and code snippets and works for a variety of sites like YouTube, Vimeo, Soundcloud, GitHub Gists, Twitter, and Pastebin.

So insert a URL into your post like this:

And after you save you'll see the expanded version:

Try it out and let us know what you think. 

-brett

We're proud to announce fast, simple, beautiful image galleries are now available on Posthaven. You can upload multiple files all at the same time (press the SHIFT key when selecting files) and our post editor will upload them directly to Amazon S3 where we'll host them for you. One thing we were super careful of this time is that we now preserve the order in which you upload — you've asked for this and we made sure it happened.

When they're ready, they'll appear in the compose window and they'll look like this:

Just click on it and you'll be greeted with a simple way to upload more photos to that gallery, combine that gallery with other images in the same post, or pop individual ones out. 

It's a great way to tell stories. We've also revamped our image gallery code on your blogs. They're the fastest galleries available on the web because we automatically pre-load all images in the background so that your blog viewers can flip through all the photos instantly with as little loading time as possible. Use the arrow keys to flip from left to right too! 

You can also click on the photos themselves and see full screen versions now too. Here's a real live one you can play with right now:

We also updated the mini previews at the top of every gallery so that they are more compact and elegant no matter how many photos you upload to a given gallery. 

All of this is available now at Posthaven. We're working hard to make this the best and most durable place to post. Thanks for your support. 

Thanks to everyone who signed up and imported from Posterous before their shutdown! It has been a hectic week making sure all the extra imports were running smoothly but now Garry and I are very excited to get back to focusing on Posthaven features. We've re-opened signups and added some information about our roadmap on our pledge page.

With our work on features in mind we are not going have time to support import from the Posterous backup .zip files in the near term. If got caught off guard by the Posterous shutdown and were unable to move your data beforehand but still want to preserve it, then I encourage you to signup for a free Wordpress account and use the Wordpress export XML file included in your Posterous backup to import to Wordpress as soon as possible.

There are a few very good reasons to do this even if you do not intend to use Wordpress over the long term:

• The Wordpress export XML file references higher quality images files than those included in the Posterous archive .zip and Wordpress will download and re-host these files for you, but...
• Posterous import to Wordpress using that file will only be fully functional until May 31st after which Posterous will stop hosting all the media files referenced by the Wordpress XML exports.
• Given the nature and potentially huge size of these Posteorus zip archives my guess is that not many sites will support importing directly from them. Having your content re-hosted by Wordpress will mean that later you will be able to export from Wordpress in a format that is widely accepted. (Posthaven will likely offer Wordpress import at some point too, but again, for the time being we are heads down working on adding new functionality.)

Brett and I continue to be busy working on all the features you know and loved from Posterous. Here's the latest -- now you can add Facebook and Twitter autopost to your sites. It's on a per-site basis right now, but once you've linked your account it's one click to add them to your other sites (if you have others). 

We'll be adding Facebook Pages, Google+, App.net, and LinkedIn shortly. Commenting and post by email are both also very high on the list, so expect those in the near future. As you know, we're implementing what took us years to do previously, but we're trying to do it in just a matter of months! We appreciate your patience. 

There's only 5 days left for Posterous users to switch. If you made the switch, please let your friends know on Facebook, Twitter, and your old Posterous blog. You can give them the link to the definitive migration guide here: http://blog.posthaven.com/the-posterous-migration-guide

Thanks for your support -- we can use all the help we can get to get the word out. 

Now you can edit, add, and delete pages, links and menus. 

• Pages are just like posts -- they contain text, and any type of media. 
• Links point to another website -- any URL

There's one navigation menu at the top of every site, and you can also create additional menus that will appear at the bottom of the left hand sidebar of your Posthaven. You can get to Pages & Links in the Site Settings area of any site. 

There are only 14 days left to import your posts from Posterous. Don't get left out in the cold.

We're looking forward to bringing you a lot more, as soon as we can. It took a larger team years to make all the things you liked about Posterous, and we're trying to do it in a few months. Thanks for your support, from both Brett and I.

-Garry

With the help of our good friends at the amazing transcoding provider Zencoder we are happy to say we now fully support audio and video uploads in our post editor. Further, now you can also upload any of the document types Scribd supports and we will embed them in your post.

Create a new post (or edit an existing one) and use this button:

to add images, videos, audio files, or documents to any of your posts. 

Hi guys -- Brett and I are super busy bringing everything you liked about Posterous back to Posthaven. Here's one of the more basic features that you've been requesting. 

Just hit the post editor (edit a post or click New Post) and now you'll be able to change your tags, set posts to private, and edit the date associated with your post. 

We're working every day to bring back the things you want. Upcoming features this week include video and audio transcoding, editing pages and links, and autopost to Facebook, Twitter, App.net and LinkedIn. 

As always, email us anytime at help@posthaven.com if you have questions. Thanks for your support. 

Posterous is shutting down as of April 30th, so it is ever more important for users to weigh their options and choose their next platform. 

We created Posthaven to provide a perfect export option to Posterous users. Before this, we were key parts of the team that built Posterous in 2008 and wrote and designed much of the software. My cofounder Brett and I both left over a year prior to the acquisition by Twitter. We were never part of the decision to shut it down or sell the company. 

While we're quite happy that the team ended up in a great place, we're super bummed that our years of effort will end up being shut down on April 30th, and as users ourselves, we're just as unhappy as you are that we have to move. 

Posthaven isn't the only option out there, so here's the list of what else you could do, and why we think Posthaven is your best choice. 

1) Wordpress.com (free)

To do this:

1. Go to Wordpress.com
2. Sign up for an account and create a blog
3. Go to Tools > Import > Posterous
4. Upload the wordpress_export_1.xml file from your Posterous backup. 
5. Wordpress emails you when the process is done.

You can take the backup from Posterous and upload the XML file within it, and Wordpress will import posts, download media, and drop it into your new Wordpress site. 

It isn't perfect, however -- document files and audio files are not downloaded and will be lost, since they are hotlinked to the posterous.com domain, which will go away. Image files are downsized to 1000 pixel max width versions. Comments are brought over, but all comments lose the name of the person who left the comment. We've heard reports Unicode characters are broken also, which makes it not an option for non-English speaking blogs.

For those who don't want to pay and are OK with losing a few aspects to their site, Wordpress.com is your option. 

2) Tumblr using JustMigrate.com (free for 100 posts, $10 to $99 for more)

1. Go to justmigrate.com
2. Enter your posterous hostname and email address
3. Link your account to Tumblr
4. Pay for extra posts if needed
5. The team will email you when your site is ready. 

The JustMigrate team is actually a startup team out of India called 3Crumbs and they'll import about 100 of your posts for free, but if you have more than that, it'll cost more. It's $10 for 250 posts, $25 for 500 posts, and $99 for a business account with support and no post limits. Tumblr imposes a limit to the number of imported posts per day, between 60 and 100 per day. 

This option does not support comment importing. These items are lost in the import. To Siddarth's credit, they've recently added video, audio and multiple image support. 

For those who really want their content on Tumblr, JustMigrate is your only option.

3) Squarespace ($10/mo)

1. Go to squarespace.com and sign up for an account
2. Pay $96/year or $10/mo
3. Go to the Cog Icon and click Import/Export (10th option from top of subnav)
4. Click Import Site (and wait a while for Squarespace to load data)
5. Posterous blogs will all be imported under http://yoursite.squarespace.com/posteroushostname, e.g. mine was at http://garry-tan.squarespace.com/garry

Squarespace has done an admirable job with this option. It's clean and mostly bug free (though my first import failed and I had to enter my credentials twice to try again). Full image galleries do come through, though Squarespace galleries are quite unintuitive in that you can't tell that they're image galleries (no indication there are more photos.) 

However, there is still data loss, as all of the following will not be brought over: documents, audio, video files. These types of files are all lost. Your URLs will break because of step 5 above -- the URLs change and can't be preserved except for whatever Posterous blog you set as your homepage.  Just like Wordpress, you still lose the names of your commenters.

For those who have intense customization needs and want the power-user option, have only one Posterous blog you want to preserve URLs for, and don't care about video, audio and document files, Squarespace can work just fine. 

4) Edublogs ($8/mo for import)

Edublogs is a Wordpress Multi-User-based system, but it appears to be broken at the moment. Their Posterous XML-based importer (probably the same one as Wordpress.com above at best) shows this error:

Are there other options you've heard of? Let us know at help@posthaven.com.

5) Posthaven ($5/mo)

1. Go to Posthaven.com and sign up for an account
2. Click Import and enter your Posterous credentials. 
3. Posthaven downloads all your data from Posterous using the API and emails you when it's done

Posts are saved perfectly, with no munging of HTML or breakage. Since we were two out of the three original people who worked on Posterous, you can expect most everything you liked about Posterous will be in Posthaven sooner or later. 

Right now, importing works great. The service has imported over 800,000 objects in the past week and a half, and everyone who has used it so far has been very satisfied with the quality of the import. 

All of the following are properly imported and saved, because we are Posterous users too and have a lot of data we wanted to save: 

• URL matching, so full pagerank is preserved if you are using a custom domain
• full resolution photos and photo galleries
• video
• audio
• documents
• tags
• view counts
• pages
• comments

It's the most comprehensive form of import available. The Posthaven team is continuing to work on the platform. Post by web is in a working state and being improved, while post by email and bookmarklet are coming soon after. 

For those who care about their data and want as close to perfect as possible preservation of their memories, thoughts, and blog posts, Posthaven is the best way to go. 

Posthaven is the only place you can save your data safely. 

All of the other options result in some form of data loss. Lost photos. Lost photo galleries. Lost videos. Lost documents. Lost audio files. Lost comments. That's just not OK.

We're the team that built it the first time, and we'll make it even better this time. None of the other services will be able to bring back the way the bookmarklet worked, or post by email, or how email notifications worked.

We guarantee you'll love your import, or your money back.

We are happy to refund your $5 if you don't like the results of the import or are dissatisfied for any reason. Email us at help@posthaven.com if you have any questions, comments, suggestions, or just want to learn more. 

Sign up for Posthaven today »