The Pownce Blog

Pownce offers several ways to export your data and import to other blog software. To get started, you’ll need to go to the Pownce export settings page and generate your export files. Once you’ve received your export files, you should save them to your computer but you can also import them to another blog! We’ve tested and verified Pownce importing into Vox, TypePad and Wordpress.com.

Vox

Vox offers a “neighborhood”, a social network that is home to a great community. You can even view your friends’ latest posts on your neighborhood page. You can find my Vox blog (including Pownce posts) at leahculver.vox.com.

To start importing, log in to your Vox account or create a new Vox account. Then go to You -> Library -> Posts and click on the “Import…” button.

Enter the URL to your export settings page - it should contain your secret key - and click “Go.” You can then select which posts you’d like to import or can choose to “Import all posts.”

TypePad

Download and save your Movable Type formatted file from your Pownce export settings page. Next, login to your TypePad account and select the blog you would like to import to or create a new TypePad blog. From the TypePad manage blog page, select Import/Export and choose to import from a TypePad, Movable Type, or other MTIF file. Choose to upload a file from your computer and select the Movable Type file that you have saved.

Click “Import” and your posts will start importing!

 WordPress.com

Download and save your Movable Type formatted file from your Pownce export settings page. Log in to the WordPress.com blog which you would like to import to or create a new Wordpress.com blog. In your WordPress.com admin, go to Tools -> Import and select “Movable Type and TypePad.” Choose the Movable type file that you have saved and click “Upload file and import” to begin importing.

Privacy

Pownce respects the privacy of your notes. For Vox imports, only public notes will be imported. For TypePad and WordPress, private and friends-only notes will be imported as drafts for you to review.

 Photos, video, music and files

Your exports contain links to your files and Six Apart will host all Pownce files for at least one year. When importing to Vox, your image thumbnails will be imported into your Vox library.

We have some very big news today at Pownce. We will be closing the service and Mike and I, along with the Pownce technology, have joined Six Apart, the company behind such great blogging software as Movable Type, TypePad and Vox. We’re bittersweet about shutting down the service but we believe we’ll come back with something much better in 2009. We love the Pownce community and we will miss you all.

We’re very happy that Six Apart wants to invest in growing the vision that we the founders of Pownce believe so strongly in and we’re very excited to take our vision to all of Six Apart’s products. Mike and I have joined Six Apart as part of their engineering team and we’re looking forward to being a part of the talented group that has created amazing tools for blogging and publishing.

We’ll be closing down the main Pownce website two weeks from today, December 15th. Since we’d like for you to have access to all your Pownce messages, we’ve added an export function. Visit pownce.com/settings/export/ to generate your export file. You can then import your posts to other blogging services such as Vox, TypePad, or WordPress.

For our Pro members, we’ll be emailing you soon with more information about your Pro account.

As for the Pownce team, we’ll continue posting on Vox. You can find me at leahculver.vox.com, Mike at mjmalone.vox.com, and Ariel at arielwaldman.vox.com. The Six Apart announcement can be found on their company blog.

We really appreciate your continued support and understanding. Thanks so much for being part of the Pownce community.

The Pownce site has been acting a little wonky this weekend. One of our databases was not keeping up to date, resulting in displaying old notes instead of your most recent ones.

Don’t worry, no posts or replies were lost!

We’re working on fixing the issue now. Thanks for letting us know about the problem and for your patience and support.

Oh noes! We’ve had some issues this morning. Our slave database was corrupted and we’re currently running on one database while we restore from backup. You might see some error messages and slowness but the site should be fine shortly. Thanks so much for your patience and understanding.

Update: Today is not our lucky day. Our backup database is also having some issues, so the site will be down while we recover.

Photo by unclebumpy on Flickr

My favorite Halloween tradition is pumpkin carving. This year I was inspired to make a Pownce-themed pumpkin!

More photos on Flickr.

I hope you all have a safe and fun Halloween!

This may be the craziest application built for Pownce yet - a robot that pours beer when sent a Pownce message!

With a quick post from your iPhone, the robot pours a nice cold beer. Matt Reid created this Lego Mindstorms robot for Barcamp Nashville. I want one.

Mozilla labs has a new Firefox extension, Geode, that will fetch your location when you visit certain websites. We’ve partnered with the Mozilla folks so that you can use Geode to update your Pownce location. It’s fairly simple once you’ve got the plug-in installed and your Fire Eagle account linked with Pownce.

Here’s what you’ll need to do:

1. Connect your Pownce account with Fire Eagle if you have not done so already.
2. Download and install the latest Mozilla Firefox web browser.
3. Read Mozilla’s blog post and download and install Geode.
4. Restart Firefox.
5. Visit your Pownce homepage. You should see an “update” button next to your Fire Eagle location.

   

6. Click “update” and grant Pownce access to your location.

   

Done! Your new location should appear in your profile and on each new note you send.

You can also update your location via the Fire Eagle settings page. If you have Geode installed, you’ll be asked if you’d like to update your location using Firefox. After you allow Pownce access to your location, the location field should display your coordinates and when you click “update”, we’ll find you based on those coordinates.

At Pownce we’re working very hard to make it easier to update your location and tell you’re friends where you’re at. It’s super fun to see where your friends are and where they’re posting notes from. It’s just one more way that Pownce helps keep you connected.

Pownce is now running on (the very new!) Django 1.0. You probably won’t notice any difference, but if you see something fishy please let us know. Sorry for the down time today and thanks to Malcolm for helping us upgrade!

Yay! Django 1.0 is here. Pownce is one of the largest websites built with the Django framework and soon we’ll be running 1.0.

In the meantime, Djangocon is going on this weekend in Mountain View, CA. I’ll be speaking on the Django Success Stories panel and Mike and I will be there with free Pownce buttons and stickers! Can’t make it? You can still get stickers and buttons via a SASE.

Also, if you’re itching to build your own Django site, our friends over at MediaTemple just launched their Django GridContainer service for cheap and reliable Django project hosting.

Congratulations to the Django team!

Tell your friends your location by updating Pownce via Fire Eagle – the new service from Yahoo! that lets you keep your location information in one handy place. Once you’ve set your location on Fire Eagle, all of your Pownce photos, links, songs, events, and messages will then be geo-tagged with your current location. Your friends will be able see what you sent and where you sent it from.

All you need to get started is a Fire Eagle account, which takes about 30 seconds if you already have a Yahoo! ID. Login to Pownce and visit pownce.com/settings/fireeagle/ to get started.

Congratulations to the Fire Eagle team on their recent launch. A number of us Powncers will be at the launch party Thursday night in San Francisco… it’d be great to see you there!