Posterous: A Simple Blogging App for Android

Posterous is a blogging service that emphasizes simplicity, ease of use, and autopost integration with more than 20 third-party services such as Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and YouTube. Posterous for Android aims to optimize your Android phone for mobile blogging.

You don't need the app or even an account in order to use Posterous in its simplest form: You can just e-mail your post (including images or files as attachments) to post@posterous.com. Posterous will create a bare-bones Website for you, and will reply to your e-mail with the site's URL. To use more advanced features of Posterous, however, you will have to register an account. You can register in the phone app, but since you will need to use a desktop browser to configure autopost and other advanced features such as custom themes and domains, you're probably better off using the desktop browser to get started.

In keeping with the emphasis on simplicity, this app is easy to navigate. The first time you open the app, it will prompt you to log in, but you can skip this step and start posting right away if you wish. If you do log in, your blog or blogs (you can have more than one blog attached to an account) will display in a list. Click a site to see a chronological list of recent posts; click a post to view it.

On the Settings tab you you can choose photo and video quality for your posts (full, medium, or low). I picked full quality; but if you pay per kilobyte of data or have a poor data connection, the lower-quality settings might work better for you.

To compose a post, click the green Post button, pick the site you want to publish to, and type in a title (optional) and some body text (optional). To attach an image or video clip, click the plus sign at top right of the screen. You can select from the Gallery app or use your phone's camera to take a new photo or video clip. You can attach more than one image or video; if you do so, Posterous will automatically embed an image gallery or video player in your post.

If you want to tag your post with descriptive keywords, click the 'i' button at the top right and input the tags. Posterous automatically creates a site taxonomy based on your tags: For example, one of my Posterous sites has a page that includes all posts tagged "Oakland."

The Posterous app is also available in the Share menu of other apps, such as the Web browser. I made this post on my blog just by sharing a Flickr image link--Posterous is smart enough to recognize the URL as an image and embed it.

In my tests, though, the app choked on YouTube links. By contrast, if you use e-mail to post a YouTube link, Posterous will automatically embed the video in the post--so e-mail has an edge over the app in that regard. Also, e-mailed posts can embed any kind of file type, but the app can handle only images and video clips.

The main advantage of the Posterous app is that it shows a list of your posts and makes viewing them easy. If you simply want to post images and video, the app will probably be an attractive option for you. But if you want the widest range of functionality, e-mail is still the best method of posting.

Which Android app do you think is best for blogging? Contact Brent W. Hopkins on Facebook or on Twitter. You might also like other articles by Brent W. Hopkins.