I began blogging around the same time the term “blog” first become common. Since then my words have lived at Vox, Yahoo 360, Orkut, LiveJournal, Blogger, WordPress, Posterous, MySpace you name it. My blog has gone under several names, and has looked wildly different from year to year. One thing has beenconsistent though - it has endured.
Here I am again, at an imaginary cross-roads of my own making, thinking aloud that I might like Tumblr more than I like WordPress. It’s a pointless argument, and reminds me somewhat of Winnie the Pooh (who you’ll be starting to realise I mention regularly) choosing one honey pot over another.
Random thoughts that occur to me as I sit here contemplating over a cup of coffee;
The Tumblr community is awesome, and right on your doorstep, should you be brave enough to open the door and step outside.
The WordPress community is only as awesome as you might try to construct - you have to be your own advertising agent and door-to-door salesmen if you want more than you and your pet dog to know it exists.
Within a week of trying “life at Tumblr”, I am getting more traffic than the seven years of my life garnered at WordPress. This is probably a damning reflection on my laziness when it comes to SEO, but it’s still a fact.
Tumblr doesn’t charge me to monkey with the HTML of my blog - which, being a software developer - I am likely to do about every 30 seconds as the next brainwave arrives.
Due to the HTML freedom afforded me, I am allowed to install the latest and greatest thing-o-matic into the blog. Granted, I will remove it again a few minutes later, but it does mean I play - unlike at WordPress, where the powers that be look down from their mighty hillside and decree that “thou shalt not fiddle”.
None of the monkeying costs anything at Tumblr. I’m cheap. There. I said it. I can even change the domain name to “captainfantasticblogger.com” for no more than the cost of the domain name from GoDaddy.
Tumblr is filled with AWESOME people. Seriously. I’ve met more amazing people in the last few days - quite by accident mostly - than I have in yearsof writing a WordPress blog.
If there’s one thing going against Tumblr, it’s that you have to use the API to get your content back out. Nobody has built an “export everything” feature yet. Perhaps it’s because the Tumblr police execute everybody over a certain age, like in Logans Run?
I’m tending towards some kind of weird mashup - where I dump everything here in Tumblr, and then re-post the “better stuff” back to WordPress with the free admission that not everything that comes out of my brain is actually worth remembering you know, like everything everybody posts on Twitter