Moments

Still waters, softly falling on the sand
Birds chirping, softly circling the space around
Your fingers, softly touching my arm 
The moon, softly shining in the sky around.
The sound of your voice, melodiously reaching my ears
The feel of your smile, softly permeating the air around.
Incredible moments that describe the past year.
Incredible feelings that move us on.
Incredible experiences that excited us, this past year.
Incredible things to look forward the year on.

Happy 2013.

With a heavy heart, life after @Posterous

I’ve been a Posterous advocate for some time now and my loyalty to the platform only grew the more I used it. It wasn’t without its problems (themes, for a start), but when it came to posting & sharing, Posterous stood out on platform and features. I ran four different blogs on Posterous — what-was-this-blog, food, corporate and more recently, a collection of pictures — and converted a few people to it as well.

Something I’m yet to see in any other platform is how well Posterous managed sharing. The ability for group blogs to have posts shared to a group account and people’s personal accounts was pretty solid, not to mention Posterous’ autoposting capabilities. For example, I never once manually uploaded a picture to my Flickr in over two years but I have a full photo history there.

Sadly, their Twitter acquisition has changed all of this.

As Twitter tends to do, they hired the Posterous team for talent, which is great and I’m really happy for the guys too — I’ve followed some of them and know them to be driven individuals who care about their products.

But I also know that Posterous will not develop new features for the foreseeable future. This is a problem in and of itself. What’s more, existing things are starting to break (or being intentionally deactivated, I’m not really sure) and there’s no one supporting that.

At first I thought my big question would be where do I go. Oddly enough, that decision didn’t take long, but I learnt that the real question was how.

Wordpress is the only platform that has a Posterous importer that actually works but I had/have no interest in moving there.* I have no inclination to maintain a self-hosted break-fix blog and .com tends to be a little limited with the kind of tweaks I like to have. Plus, my blog is a lot about bits and pieces, thoughts and observations, a link here, a picture there and for that, Tumblr actually does a significantly better job, while managing the environment for me. So this is where I am today.

In fun timing, Tumblr’s recent post:

Tumblr has broken into the Top 10 sites in the U.S., and now has a worldwide audience of 170 million people.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve moved my blogs and have started a shutdown of the old. The blog & feed URL will stay in case there are people that do actually read along.

At the rate the migration occurred, I think I will be annoyed enough to write out a post talking about how this was accomplished, because it is in fact turning out to be a rather woeful experience. More on that later.

To Posterous. The platform that was.

Update, 15 Feb 2013: As expected, Posterous will shut down April 30.

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*For the record, I do think that Wordpress is one of the strongest content/blogging platforms out there, it’s just not for me.

Good read: Are We Back On Track? by @alexandermcnabb

Alexander McNabb:

Dubai was founded on trade, not real estate booms. It was founded on entrepeneurialism and what ‘the authorities’ always liked to call a ‘laissez faire’ attitude to free market economics. It was opportunistic. And it will continue to succeed on trade, not selling implausible dreams. Its most successful and enduring assets, Jebel Ali, Emirates, Port Rashid and others, are built on trade. 

…
The million dollar question is whether we, collectively, have learned our lesson. Whether we can build for the future without being pitched back into the nightmare of the boom.

Good read: Are We Back On Track? by @alexandermcnabb

You just have to do something

jonathanmoore:

Over the course of my career and journey as an entrepreneur, I have learned that success and fulfillment is found when we push ourselves beyond our comfort zone. There is tremendous value in having knowledge ahead of time — I am now CPR certified — but simply taking action is often what it takes.

You don’t have to do it right. You just have to do something.

You just have to do something