G’day mate. Greetings from Down Under. I’m writing this post from Brisbane, Australia at the end of a 2 week long vacation. If you’ve never been to Australia, I highly recommend going.

As I was getting ready for the trip a few weeks ago, I wanted to setup a blog so I could keep everyone up-to-date of my travels and whereabouts. I was going to go with either a new Wordpress setup, or through Tumblr, but Russ suggested I check out a new popular micro-blog Posterous. I checked it out and was pretty pleased with its ease of use, but a little dissapointed with the features it doesn’t have. Here are some of my main likes and dislikes:

Like: Easy to Post – Posterous’ main feature is that it’s extremtly easy to submit new posts. All you really have to do is send an email or an SMS message, with or without media attachments, and Posterous will add a new post to your page.

Like: “Zero Setup” – You don’t even have to sign up for an account. You email post@posterous.com and they setup your account for you.

Like: Social Media Sync - You can easily setup Posterous to update your social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter. You can even select which sites to update every time you send an update by changing the email address you post to.

Like: Image formatting - Posterous takes all your images and puts them together in a nice format, consisting of a main image view (one image at a time) and a collection of thumbnails for every image you added to the post.

Like: Overall Clean UI – The Posterous UI is easy to navigate, and your blogs are easily customizable.

Dislike: Lack of Post Formatting – Part of the problem is that users are most likely posting through email or text, so not having many options for customization through email or SMS is understandable. The real problem is that the Posterous online posting/editing is not very robust, which brings me to my next dislike…

Dislike: Online Posting/Editing – Sadly, Posterous is NOT Wordpress, and therefore is a little bit lacking in the area of formatting. There is a rich-text editor, but you can’t actually import media. The other problem is that if you want to edit a Posterous post that you submitted through email and contained images, Posterous just inserts a single custom HTML tag to reference the all the images. Basically, you can move around the image area, but you cannot separate or annotate individual images. This part is a huge pain, but if you’re not expected Wordpress, then you’ll be ok.

So overall, I really liked using Posterous for its ease of use, clean layout and ability to sync with social media sites. But Posterous definitely lacks in a few areas that may or may not be a deal breaker for your needs. If you’re looking for ease of use, Posterous is great. If you’re looking for Wordpress, well… CRIKEY!!!  Use Wordpress.  And while you’re at it, throw another shrimp on the barbie.   OK, I’ll stop with all the cliche Australian slang.