A couple of years ago I posted Bye Bye Blogger, Hello Posterous. Today I move away from Posterous and onto telegram.

Since Posterous made their announcement about being acquired by twitter, the service has suffered bit by bit. First of all comments stopped being displayed inline. Then email posting became really delayed. Finally, last week, the service was down for quite a few hours, and when the site came back up, the custom domain’s remained down for about a day. I had no response to my tweets for support, and I couldn’t find any easy explanations. So time to move on.

A lot of my recent thoughts have been about ownership of data, and making things easy to move around, building less reliance on service providers. So, telegram scratches this itch as I can just write html or markdown documents and store them in dropbox or github. It means I rely on the telegram service to render my content, but at least the content is easily accessible. I’ve also chosen to use disqus for commenting (mainly because I’m lazy and this was already available)

It also helped that:

It isn’t as polished as posterous, and doesn’t (as yet) have a responsive version, but if I want it, I can probably create it (there are templates in github that you can easily change). I’m hopeful that by moving to an html/markdown method my options in the future are greater. Time will tell I guess.

Today I had an attempt at cleaning up some of the posts - the early ones had been pretty untouched since moving over from blogger, and so still had blogger tracking in and then there were posterous styles on top of that. I went for a fairly simple automated approach and wrote myself a hacky .net console app using regular expressions to search and replace known patterns. There are going to be some dead links for a while - especially where I referred to whole categories of posts - but I’m working on that, and the fact that I have access to the raw text means that this is a much easier task.

Theoretically, the rss feed should still be at the same place, and, with the exception that you may suddenly see a batch of posts again, should just work.

I’d be really grateful to hear of any problems you encounter, or (easy) improvements I can make.