Yet another blog move

It seems that I cannot stay on a blog engine for too long. I was pretty happy with posterous for a while. Posting was easy, I could hook it up with a custom domain, etc. So what has changed? Well, I looked at my analytics report and found something really interesting. I would've thought that the guys building a blogging engine (or at least the chaps at twitter) care about their customers' readers.

The symptom

I have set up the autopost feature to automatically publish a link to my new post to facebook and twitter. I even had a twitter account for my blog, and it had a message that @vsbmeza posted a new article, and my personal account said that I have posted something on @alterillusion. Such a lovely feature. But what it results in, is a number of direct hits to an article. Awesome! Loads of readers read my postings every time I had one. But what next? Nothing. My engagement numbers were hitting the ground.

The cause

Posterous has 2 views. A POST view, and a list of entries on the homepage view. There is a common sidebar, which holds an archive and a tags list. So when you have somebody on a particular article, the only thing that could get them to navigate to a new article is either click on an archive or a tag link. There are no "recent posts" or even a "random posts" section. No titles, no content preview, nothing. Why would you expect anyone to start browsing the content if they have no idea what's behind those tags? The time of our readers is precious. They don't want to waste it for irrelevant articles, and we don't want them to feel that they've done that with our content.

My solution

I moved my blog to Google's Blogger. It has all the stuff I need in order to navigate my dear readers to posts they might be interested in. Even to entries on other blogs from people I like reading. It just feels right.

Some might argue that the autopost is more important than the user journey. While I do not agree, I did miss the feature. Fortunately there is a wonderful service on the internet which is just fit for the job: ifttt.com

Anyway, old posts will be popping up as I re-format them during the migration process.

p.s.: AlternateIllusion is over, at least for a while due to a really bad choice of domain registrator.