New "follow" box coming to Posterous blogs, updated Android app in Jan. 2012

Last night I noticed a new, more compact and elegant version of the "Posterous bar" that sits atop all of the platform's user blogs. I first saw it on one of Garry Tan's Posterous sites. Tan is a co-founder of the blogging platform who later left to join start-up incubator (and Posterous investors) Y Combinator. His Posterous now sports the classy new Posterous bar/box, pictured below.

The Posterous box, referred to in the code used to implement it as the "pbar," allows signed-in Posterous users to easily start writing a new post, subscribe to someone else's Posterous (now called "Follow") or click a to their Posterous Reader (a stream of new posts from Posterous users you follow). In addition, you can view your own spaces, see a slideshow of images from the Posterous you're currently visiting, or click the "Close" link to close the box.

That last bit seems unnecessary from a design perspective because the box is a rollover and, when your mouse strays away from the box, it closes automagically.

Regardless of that minor criticism, it looks like Posterous is either testing the new "pbar" on a limited basis or slowly rolling it out to their entire userbase. The Official Posterous Space still rocks a "first gen" Posterous bar, while CEO Sachin Agarwal's has the "second gen" bar. Posterous Director of Engineering Vincent Chu, though, already has the new bar on one of his blogs.

I didn't see it on mine, but instead of stick to the second gen bar while I wait to see what they're doing with this newfangled thingy, I decided to dig around in the source code of one the blogs with the new bar and found the bits you need to add to get the bar early.

Yes, this is the kind of stuff only geeks do.

You'll see the new bar in the top right of this page, and here's how to add it to your Posterous. You'll need to be comfortable messing around with the raw HTML of your theme to do this.

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1. Go to your Space's Customize Page, and then to Advanced. Click the image below to expand it. Search for "{block:PosterousBar}" without the quotes.

2. Type "<!--" before {block:PosterousBar}, again without the quotes. Then, type "-->" without the quotes after {/block:PosterousBar}. Everything between the <! and the > should turn orange. This turns that snippet into a comment that stays hidden in the code when users load the page. This way it's still there if you don't like how the new bar looks on your Posterous, or you decide for some other reason to switch back later.

3. For some reason I can't post raw code here, so click the link below and then copy and paste the code snippet directly below the part you commented out in Step 2. Note: You can verify that the code below is the real deal by searching for a piece of it in the source code over at garry.posterous.com (Go to page > Right click > View source).

Third-generation Posterous Bar Code (.TXT)

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That's it. Click "Preview these changes" and the new bar should load. For a moment the Posterous logo will flash, but that's just there for browsers in which javascript is turned off. The new box should load right away. Make sure everything looks okay and click "Save, I'm done!" Let me know what you think of the update bar/box in the comments.

Bonus Round - An updated Android app on the way?

Here's a screenshot of Rich Pearson (@richiepear), VP of Marketing and Business Development at Posterous, giving me hope for an updated Android app in the near future:

I couldn't embed the tweet because Posterous still hasn't opened up javascript beyond their sandboxed server-side implementations and the iframe workarounds myself and others use to put tweets and Last.fm in our sidebars. I like the forced simplicity and security, but I wouldn't be mad if they added one of the tweet-embedding services to their feature set.

Regardless, the image says it all: hopefully Android users will see feature parity with the Posterous iOS app by the end of next month. The ability to check updates from the other Posterous blogs I follow and to see what's popular across the entire service will enhance the social aspects Posterous has been touting since the launch of Spaces.

I've been a Posterous fanboy for a while, and now that I've learned how to use it, I'm proselytizing more than ever. A solid (read: more social) Android app will make that preaching much easier to do.

This was originally posted to joeross.posterous.com.