Posterous, which was my favorite among the many hosted blogging platforms of the past few years, recently announced that it will shut down on 30 Apr, a little over a year after the company was acquired by Twitter. If you’ve got any blogs running on the service, there are instructions on requesting archives here, though be forewarned that the process of generating the archives may take several hours or more.

Also included at that link are instructions on moving your Posterous content to both WordPress and Squarespace. Either of these options are more than capable substitutes for Posterous’ functionality. But for me, the demise of Posterous means there’s really no reason to continue avoiding Tumblr.

(To be clear, this blog you’re reading is run on ExpressionEngine. I’ve been using services like Posterous for peripheral blogs that I keep mostly for my own amusement. More in this blog post from last year.)

Unfortunately, Posterous conspicuously omitted notes on how to move your blogs to Tumblr. Given the past rivalry between the two services, that’s probably understandable. Thankfully, the folks at Indian startup 3crumbs have put together Just Migrate, a simple Web-based tool that will copy all of your Posterous content to a Tumblr blog more or less effortlessly. Tumblr places some restrictions on how much content can be imported at once, and the demand on Just Migrate is already so great that the service is currently maxed out. I was lucky enough to get my migration done over the weekend, but if you get into their queue today, yours should be done well before Posterous’ 30 Apr shutdown date.