I’ve created a general-purpose blog with posts unrelated to Upload at poetengineer.postachi.io. Postach.io is a service that synchs Evernote to a blog — but only those notes that are in the Postach.io notebook and are tagged as “published”. You couldn’t ask for a simpler blogging interface, right? Blog through Evernote, from your phone, laptop, or tablet. Pretty cool.
One minor issue, which I expect a lot of people will trip over, and which I hope the postach.io folks will fix: the blank lines between paragraphs in a note on Evernote won’t translate to paragraph breaks in postach.io unless you include a space on the line between Evernote paragraphs. If you want line breaks without paragraph spacing, for poetry, code, or other purposes, you’ll have to use the <br> tag, More info on this can be found here.
Another issue worth mentioning is that there are currently no blog statistics on postach.io, from what I can tell. I’ve emailed them about this, but haven’t heard back yet. On WordPress, you can use Jetpack to get some pretty detailed statistics on who’s reading your blog, which posts are drawing the most traffic, and which links people are clicking. This is all crucial information for a serious blogger, so you can see what’s working. Without these things, I definitely wouldn’t make postach.io my primary blogging platform.
I also stumbled across a different issue. Maybe I’m slower than the average blogger, but I made the mistake of reading “postach.io” as “pistach.io”. Frustrated that I couldn’t reach “http://www.pistach.io”, I recommended that they buy the pistach.io domain and redirect it:
Issues aside, the automatic synching of Evernote notes with postach.io is awfully nice. If you want a quick way to keep personal notes but also make them public, this is a choice worth exploring.
Update: Google Analytics Available
In exploring Postach.io further, I discovered that I could enter a Google Analytics code. This is their official recommended approach to tracking who’s viewing your blog, which posts are most popular, etc. Traffic on poetengineer.postach.io is fairly light at this point, but Analytics looks like a good substitute for the Jetpack stats I’m used to on WordPress. It’s not nearly as simple and straightforward to use, but the data’s a lot richer.
Update: I Miss You, Postach.io!
When Postach.io ended its free offering and rolled out its new pricing model, I found myself priced out. Shame, as it was awfully convenient.
While eating breakfast and checking email this morning, I discovered that Upload made Chicago Book Review‘s list of the Best Books of 2014! As I work on my next novel, it’s great to be reminded that people loved my first — very encouraging.