Apologies...

I post identical content to a number of sites: Blogger/BlogSpot, Tumblr, TypePad, WordPress, Xanga and LiveJournal. I do this by posting through the Posterous meta-poster service. It's not so much that I'm trying to spam the internet with my drivel as much as I'm trying to ensure that if any given service dies, I have "backups".

At any rate, Posterous is a fairly decent service. It allows me to easily accomplish my goal of providing redundancy for my content and it offers me two main avenues for doing so: web-based and email-based submission.

I generally do web-based submission rather than email-based. Both methods have their shortcomings. The web-based submission lacks any kind of "draft" or "preview" functionality. So, once you hit that "post" button, it's sent out to all the sites you've designated for replication. If, after doing so, you notice an error, you have to go track down all the scattered posts and manually correct each.

The email-based submission isn't a much better proposition. Posterous's email-submission engine pretty much sucks ass. It sometimes seems to do really random parsing/formatting of long posts. Worse, just because things look perfect in your mail client doesn't mean they'll look anything like that at the various sites the posts get sent to.

As a "ferinstance", a post I submitted this morning had the entire first three paragraph's worth of text was randomly set to a different color and font. on several sites, it made the text invisible as that randomly-set color was the background color used on the destination-site. Even more fun, when you italicizes some text, it will take what should be a simple i-tagWORDi-tag sequence and converts it to a SPAN sequence. Worse, it will sometime embed a line-break before or after the SPAN sequence (I'd have better represented what I meant, but, BlogSpot's editor is kind of rubbish with forcibly exposing tagging).

Oh well, the price of automated formatting is that it gets botched. Even Google fucks it up, at times.