seriously, about ten times this month i've been wondering why i'm still using posterous and that is hard for me to say because i love the guys a lot - i've put everything i do on the platform because of the way they think about people and media.  i love the ethics of thought around email posting.

but we have problems.  problems that could be sorted quickly and i'm uncertain why they have to be road mapped into the coding cycle when they are super easy to implement and would give posterous a much needed social media boost anyway.

so, posterous - in the hope that you actually read some of the babble on my blog i've put together a group of functions that i would love to see happen on posterous quickly so that i can utilise my blog in the way it was meant to be used.  i realise that posterous was never probably deemed to be a fully fledged content management system but it really has taken off in that way and i love that everything out of the box works like it does.  

my suggestions for social engine tlc are as following.

ROBOTS.TXT
desperate for the ability to manage our own robots.txt file in our posterous admin for all our blogs.  i use wistia a lot for video and i could be using their amazing video seo features but i have no way that i can set my robots.txt file to reflect that the videos are on my blog.  this is causing me some pain.

RSS.XML
seriously how long is this going to take, i've been using posterous well over a year now and i cannot believe we still do not have sitemaps that we can submit to google webmaster tools.  i've got stacks of blog posts from my old blog that are not getting searched.

RESTRICTIVE RSS FEED
my rss feed from my posterous blogs is only pulling in the last twenty or so links, i'd love a bigger rss feed from my blog that has all of my blog posts within in it so i can submit that.  so much so that i got my coder friend to build me an rss feed by pulling back all of my posts from the posterous api into a file that i host on my me.dm domain (not my blog is at blog.me.dm a direct link to the posterous site) which is on mediatemple.

THE APPS NEED A REFRESH
seriously, i cannot get the iphone application to even load all my blogs on the ipad and it's so frustrating that you cannot work on the same draft everywhere.  if you start a draft on the web you simply cannot pickup where you started when you go mobile again.  they made some great progress on the adding of media elements but that draft thing is a killer! - i'm actually considering getting someone to build a web application for me that does what i need it to do via the new posterous api.  it's probably going to be faster in the long run at this rate! :)

oh and another thing that would be useful. ..

AUTOLINKS
i had this feature on my old blog system, moveabletype and i loved it that it made blogging a dream when i was mobile.  it basically allowed me to set keywords that auto linked to the url of the site i was talking about just by typing the name.  it made linking back to people i wanted to talk about regular super easy.  for instance, if i wanted to talk about a new wistia feature i was using on the road if i put the keyword 'wistia' and the url to the site into the plugin every time i mentioned wistia it would automatically link that word.  having the ability to add these keywords/urls easy (when mobile) would be useful as well.  maybe a mobile manager in the application?

quicklink | imwithphil.com

as i was out last night with alex i got an email from james telling me that the logo was done.  it's great - i really like it.  we have a few spelling and colour things that we will tweak up and make nice but the basics are there and i'm looking forward to have an intergrated posterous theme to go by the middle of next week.

the posterous theme will be intergrated over on the new domain imwithphil as we push hard over the next month to raise awareness of the project, sponsoring and donations for the town, we also want to find more phil campbells and get as many coming along to help as possible.

quicklink | raamdev

i knew after i got back from southby that i was about to get stupidly busy.

what with fibrecamp, nomad jackets and the ark project i had to get my shit together pretty sharp and i kept falling short in the layout and design department in terms of the look at feel i wanted to keep uniform across the different sites.

i already had my pipeline and blogging output locked down to fit in the way i worked and in the 'dead time' when travelling with the mifi, wireless keyboard and ipod touch but i was just not 'feeling' it from the viewer perspective.  i'm not sure if your like me but i like to be the viewer and create it - look back at it afterwards, tinkering i guess.  part hobby, part post it note feeling. ;)

so after adding a ton of nomads, digital and otherwise from around the web to my reading list for inspiration - one that really hit me was the simple and clean layout that raamdev has.  i wanted to add my own flavour to it but keep everything big and wide and spaced out with a splash of brand and theming for each site.   i've included a group of shots from each of the sites.  i'm going to use it for the ark, jackets, rattlr and new frontend redesign for me.dm

it's gonna take a bit of prodding and playing however because we are going to have to use the posterous api to pull things into the blog because believe it or not posterous does still not (half way through the year i may add) have javascript support.  the new site will use jquery, hellobar and a bunch of other neat bits of js.  nothing too heavy.

excited as well about making a blog about what i always considered myself to be.  a digital social nomad.  using social media and digital tools to capture moments but i realise that i'm not a nomad - i'm quite the opposite at the moment.  in fact, i'm settled in a location.

this brings up some interesting points in that when i do travel as part of the project i'm involved in i feel quite nomadic and i love to travel on a project, it's the time when i come alive and yet the reason i have not wanted to build just an online company is that over the last five years i've had the chance to be a sort of social media nomadic and that's been enough to brand myself that.

the digital nomad tech blog will be focused on the equipment while travelling, i've tested and used and been part of a bunch of social media teams as a brand ambassdor for the last five years so i know what works and what sucks and why.  i'm looking forward to connecting with people and making my first ebook - hell, if i can make a small amount from the book i can build a fibrecamp anywhere right? - exciting!

in the true sense of the word thou, i'm not a nomad.  this next year should prove most interesting with the story telling of the ark project, the back story of the jackets and the fibrecamp with the video side for recording content for all of these projects.  they fit all so like a glove, fantastic to finally have a unified theme that holds them together and that people can understand when they come across a site in the network.  i feel a fibrecamp makeover on the cards as well! :)

big thanks
to raamdev for his 90+ hours he spent on ignoring the right way and making something that felt right which when then made me look at my design again and build on top of that.  this will make mobile versions for the iphone, ipad and ipod touch so much easier to make.  allowing me to carry on doing my video stuff on fibrecamp

i really like the fast nature of being able to use my new ipod/wireless combi and rapidly get ideas/blogs done. biggest problem right now is the features and the fact that if your blog posts are too big the app falls over. a lot.

some things that i have noticed while using the posterous app on the ipod touch over the last few days really effect me using it.

// issues i've found so far //

- crashes the app when too much text
- picture attachments is clunky
- i have many tags so that system bulky
- updating a post makes it post again
- i have no way to get back to all my posts

// nice to have feature suggestions //

- audio recording would be a nice touch
- an auto link system would be neat
- previously used grouping would be ace
- controls to hyperlink, bold and such like

i'd use something else but the fact that all my sites are in one location and i no longer have to worry about the email addresses to send blog entries to makes you overlook the rest of the problems with it.