Posterous import for Perch blog - and ways to enhance your listings

We have had the ability to import your WordPress posts into Perch blog for some time. You can read about my experience of importing my large blog from WordPress in Moving from WordPress to Perch.

With the announcement that Posterous was to close down at the end of April, we had a number of people ask if it would be possible to import a Posterous blog from the export file they provided. As this is a WordPress format file it should have been straightforward, however we needed to add some additional code to deal with reprocessing images uploaded. This is now available to download as Blog version 3.6.3 and you can read the simple import instructions in the Importing page of the documentation.

It is worth noting that you can import multiple sets of data – so if you already have a blog and want to merge in your Posterous posts that would be no problem, just run the importer to get the posts in. No existing data will be removed. You could also merge data from multiple Posterous blogs or WordPress and Posterous. Useful for those of us discovering we have data all over the Internet that we would like to get into one location.

Enhancing listings using Feathers

A couple of features you sometimes see on Posterous style listings are infinite scrolling – where instead of a next link the next set of posts loads in as the visitor scrolls, and listings arranged into sets of floated boxes that rearrange to fit the content and screen size. We have turned a couple of popular jQuery plugins into Perch Feathers to make it easy for you to add these effects.

Infinite Scroll by Paul Irish turns your next link into an infinite scroller. This is a great approach as users without JavaScript get the previous and next links as before. You can implement our Feather on any paged content in Perch, not just Blog.

Masonry by David DeSandro organizes the display of floated boxes so that you get fewer empty gaps and strangely wrapping content. We’ve added a simple implementation to our Feather however you can customize it to fit your site using any of the examples in the Masonry docs. Again, this is not only useful for blog but could be used with any repeating content in Perch. The feature image for this post is an import of a Posterous blog of mine, using our default Quill Feather blog templates and Masonry.

We hope you like these little additions, let us know if you import a Posterous blog or use one of the Feathers, or if you have any ideas for similar features we can add.