However, I do have a history. I've spent some time on LiveJournal and also spent more then a year on a Blogger.
Well, yeah, Posterous provides a way how to import your old posts into new blog. Sorta. However, what they don't do, is what someone would call after-surgery support. This is something that I would need after I'll change my domain name into Posterous.
Here is a quick example.
I've got a plenty of posts in my LiveJournal blog, some of the are permalinked in many places. I've got even more posts in my Blogger blog, also permalinked a lot on other places. Both of them could serve the same domain name -- live.prokhorenko.us. (Actually only Blogger did, but this doesn't matter for the problem described. Both of them are capable to.)
If I'm going to do it straight, I'll get all previous links unavailable, showing the main page of Posterous for all of them. However, Posterous knows about other blogs linked to my account.
And now let me make my idea straight. Whenever my domain name is accessed, with the link which doesn't belong to Posterous, why wouldn't Posterous take all pages that cannot be accessed, and ping all of the blogs connected to my account? See the example below:
Trying 74.125.95.121...
Connected to ghs.l.google.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET /watches-are-all-about-crowns HTTP/1.1
Host: prokhorenko.blogspot.com
HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Cache-Control: no-cache, no-store, max-age=0, must-revalidate
Pragma: no-cache
Expires: Fri, 01 Jan 1990 00:00:00 GMT
Date: Tue, 01 Sep 2009 03:50:32 GMT
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
Content-Length: 3145
Server: GFE/2.0
Both Blogger & LiveJournal send 404 for the page that cannot be accessed (see example above and below). That's pretty much enough for Posterous to get the idea and reiterate to the next blog.
Trying 208.93.0.128...
Connected to whiteprohorenko.livejournal.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET /watches-are-all-about-crowns HTTP/1.1
Host: whiteprohorenko.livejournal.com
HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found
Date: Tue, 01 Sep 2009 03:52:56 GMT
Server: Apache
Set-Cookie: ljuniq=29DseGDlRGgAela:1251777176:pgstats0:m0; expires=Saturday, 31-Oct-2009 03:52:56 GMT; domain=.livejournal.com; path=/
Cache-Control: private, proxy-revalidate
ETag: "0822932ab1b464b3cab41b54693934ff"
Content-length: 1829
Keep-Alive: timeout=30, max=100
Connection: keep-alive
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Content-Language: en
It looks like a very easy fix, that could be embedded into piece of code that is responsible for showing main page, when the page is not found. However, such an easy solution would actually give a tool for many people to make Posterous there primary resource for blogging, leaving all other blogs still alive, but fading to the background.
P.S. One more ouch! I can't import my LiveJournal entries. This sucks! I'd love to.
