###Why### When Posterous was created, it was perfect.

Over time it became bloated, but it's heart was still in the right place. Then it died.

Preposterous is an attempt to ressurect the heart of Posterous, in about 150 lines of Python.

###Status### Visit http://preposterousme.com/63e0a682e09fe7eae9eeb857c42d2ccb/ To follow along with Preposterous's development and testing.

###How it works### To start a new blog, send a post via email to preposterous's email address. Preposterous will read the email, create a new blog and post your initial entry. When you want to create a new post, send another email. To edit/update an existing post, send another email with a subject line that is identical to the title of the post you want to update. To delete a post, send an email with an identical title that contains no text in the body.

Preposterus maintains an index of all bloggers using each server, and generates an index for the posts in each blog as well. Blogs are identified by the email address used to post, so to create additional blogs, just submit a post from a different email address.

Anything that can send an email can publish via Preposterus.

###Requirements### Preposterous requires Python (tested with 2.7, but probably works with any 2.x version), and a webserver that can serve static HTML; thats all. No database, no external libraries, nada.

###Useage### To setup a Preposterous server, start by setting up an email address that the server will listen to (an address you'll be sending posts to), free gmail addresses work great for this.

Next clone this repository and copy preposterous.cfg.template to preposterous.cfg. Using your favorite editor, open preposterous.cfg, theres a couple configuration variables you'll need to setup for your site.

Once the script is configured, send a post to the email address you setup above and then run the preposterous.py script. If all goes well it will return silently, and you should have a new directory where you specified the web root to be. If the script returns an error, or doesn't create a new blog directory, review the Issues list here to see if you're experiencing a known issue. If not, and if you don't know what else to do, post a new Issue here with details on your setup and how to recreate the error.

If all goes well the next step is to expose your blog files to the web. The files generated by Preposterous are simple HTML and can be served using any webserver (or even viewed directly in a browser). Finally, setup a cron job to run preposterous.py on a scheduled basis to automatically post new blog entries whenever they come into the mailbox.

If you just want to use Preposterous but don't want to run your own server read How to use Preposterous 1.0 to get started using our beta site.