More on Posterous, Tumblr and Amplify

For a couple of months now I've been trying out Posterous and Tumblr,and was recently reminded that I had tried something on Amplify a year ago, but forgotten that I belonged to it, so I had another look at that too.

I can't say that I'm fully au fait with any of them yet, and I certainly haven't discovered how to use all their features. I'm quite unqualified to write a manual on how they should be used. So why am I writing about them here?

I'm writing this because I suspect that there are a lot of people like me who are not fundies about this stuff, and yet would like to be able to use it and know what it is good for.

I've found that some things are easier than others, and things that are easy in some programs are more difficult in others.

In general, I've found Tumblr is good for gathering, and Posterous for scattering.

I use Tumblr mainly as a kind of blog aggregator. It gather stuff from various blogs that I write, and it publishes a summary. I can grab interesting stuff from the web and put it on Tumblr, and it passes that on to Twitter as well. So I say to people, if you want to follow me, follow me on Tumblr rather than Twitter. You can see summaries of my various blog posts, and if any of them look interesting, you can click on them and see the whole thing. Tumblr acts like a published set of journal abstracts -- you can look through it to find which articles might be interesting without having to read the whole thing. To me that makes more sense than an RSS feed of full blog posts, which seems to me to be the surest way to information overload. Tumblr lets you see what's available and pick the stuff you want to read.

Posterous seems to work best the other way round. It lets you input by e-mail, and then disseminate widely from there. Its e-mail input seems to work better than Tumblr, and lets you include pictures, documents, and text in the message body. In Tumblr this is more difficult, but Tumblr picks up stuff from Posterous nicely, including documents (.pdf and several other formats).

I've been using Posterous mainly for family history, and it posts stuff to our family history blog on Wordpress with no problems, as well as passing it on to Tumblr.

Our former bishop sent me a document the other day, and asked me to put it on the web for him. It was called "The responsibility of Orthodoxy in 2011". Well, I put it on a static web page (here, if anyone is curious), but it's not really the kind of material that suits a static web page. I had no hesitation in recommending Posterous to him, as it would be ideal for his purpose. All he needs to do is to e-mail the document as an attachment in .pdf, .rtf or .doc format, with his own comments, and Posterous does the rest. And when he wants to write another document in 2012 or 2013, Posterous handles that too.

Posterous has other things that don't work too well, or at least not for me.

They've just introduced a group feature, and as an experiment I started one just for our family. It works more or less like the regular Posterous, except each member of the group may contribute and it can be a private or public group. Only problem is, I can't read it. It shows a list of posts, but when you try to open any of the posts to read them, nothing happens. There's just a big blank white square on the screen, like this:



I think something is supposed to appear in that blank white area, but it doesn't.

And the same thing happens when you try to grab something off the web to post on Posterous -- a blank white area appears on the screen and a little turning thingy that says "Loading", and that's it. You can go and make a cup of coffee, or a three-course meal, and when you come back it's still "loading". And the one on Amplify seems to have similar problems. But the one on Tumblr works OK, so I'll carry on using that.

Well that's it so far. Posterous is good at one to many. Tumblr is good at many to one. I'm not sure what Amplify is good for yet.

This blog has a new home

This blog has a new home at http://hayesgreene.wordpress.com/.

I have moved the older entries over to there, but the comments entered on the Haloscan comment utility may not have been moved.

I had to move it because every time I tried to read the blog here, I got a "403 forbidden" message, so I could not read either the entries or the comments.

I hope that the new system, called WordPress, proves more reliable than this one.

See you there.

Internet problems

Still having problems with Internet access. We bought an extra 2 gig of access till the end of the month, but it meant having a new temporary account and changing all sorts of settings, and in the process some e-mail was lost, as they put in the wrong address. Things seem to be working for now, though, so if you sent any e-mail to which you expected a reply, please resend.

And please, before sending any e-mail with big attachments (over 100Kb), ASK FIRST! Running out of bandwidth causes huge problems.

Family news, links, odds and ends

News of 2006

Check our family home page for general news and background, especially if you landed here without knowing who we are and are not sure if you know us.

Several friends and family members have sent us Christmas cards and letters, giving news of themselves and their doings, and this is a kind of response to them.

Val, after working for ADT security for 8 years, left for a new job at Telezero in July, at a considerable drop in pay. The advantage was that it was much closer to home, and spending four hours a day in traffic jams was just too much. She's now resigned from Telezero, and is waiting for her new job to start.

Our daughter Bridget has just moved to a new house in Athens, close to the university, where she is studying for her master's in theology. She had been working part-time translating books from Greek to English, and is hoping for a job with a big publisher.

Our sons Simon and Jethro are still living at home.

In 2006 we lost three dogs. Our younger dog, Alexa, took ill one morning in January and died before we could get her to the vet. Our other dog, Ariel pined, so we got an Alsatian puppy, Ralf, who died after we had him 12 days. We got him to the vet, and he died on the examination table, and the vet diagnosed biliary, which we think must have been what did in Alexa as well. We got another puppy, Mardigan, a few weeks later, and he was poisoned by the thieves who stole our Toyota Venture from the yard. We got him to the vet, and he seemed likely to recover, but the day after he got home, he had a relapse and died. We later got another puppy, called Samwise, and he is still with us.

In December with the blessing of our Archbishop Seraphim, Steve organised a youth conference with Fr Athanasius Akunda, the first Orthodox youth conference in our diocese. Click here for full report with pictures.

We had a double Christmas in 2006/7 -- if you'd like to see more, with pictures, click here and here.

Blogs and blogrolling

If you look at the column on the right, you will see a "Blogroll" -- that's a list of blogs of people related to us. If you hover the cursor over the name of the blog, you should get a description of which branch of the family they belong to (and so be able to see if they are related to you too).

If you are related to us, and have a personal or family blog or web journal, please tell us about it, so that we can add it to the blogroll. If you just have a web page somewhere, please sign our guest book (you'll also see it in the right-hand column) and put in a link to it, so that we can visit your page.

Comments and links

You can also leave comments about this and any other postings in this blog -- you'll see two places where you can leave comments, and read other comments. If there are no other comments it will say "0 comments", but if you click on it, you can add your own comments. You may be asked to senter a series of letters, as a precaution against spam. Sometimes you have to do it twice before your comment is accepted, but it will tell you when your comment has been saved.

So there are plenty of ways of keeping in touch, and we hope we will hear from you!

Steve & Val Hayes

Running out of bandwidth

For the last couple of days we have had no internet access, because we have used up our 2 Gig limit.

This means that we cannot use e-mail or any other services for one week out of four, and so if anyone wonders why we haven't responded to e-mails etc, that is why.

There seems to be an idea the "broadband" means unlimited access, and so people scoff at complaints about sending e-mails with HTML codes that take up ten times the space of the message text, and things like that. I've never looked at YouTube videos that people put in ther blogs, or refer to in e-mails, and newsgroup postings, and we still run out of bandwidth.

Of course part of it is spam, but the fact is that bandwidth is not unlimited, even in these days of high-speed connections.