On Tumblr
Posted on Saturday, October 17, 2009
I've been off WordPress and using Tumblr now for a few weeks, and here’s what I love about it: it feels easier to use than other blogging platforms, but in many ways it’s actually more complicated. The trick is that the complicated stuff is hidden so well.
Design Choices
Here’s what I mean: in WordPress, or any standard blogging platform, there are “posts”. (Well, “pages” too, but the only difference is that pages are outside your timeline.) For every post, you have the same set of choices: title, body content, an excerpt, tags, categories, custom fields, etc. So to post to WordPress, you have one big choice (“I want to write a post”) and then you get a bunch of small choices you can use to shape that post.
Tumblr breaks it up differently. Instead of that first simple choice (“I want to write a post”) you have six options: “Do I want to write a text, link, quote, photo, video or audio post?” This choice shapes the fields you see when you’re posting. It also shapes the priority of those fields. For example, here’s what posting a link looks like:
If you want to add a description, you can. But you don’t have to. And titles are always optional in Tumblr. If you don’t explicitly add one, Tumblr just doesn’t display a title. The post is a link, so the link is what is important.
You can have a tumblr-style blog using WordPress. I spent a few years trying, actually. My WordPress theme made titles optional: if I didn’t explicitly set one, it didn’t show up. I used Asides for short posts and links. And there are some nice themes available that will let you do this sort of thing.
But this pursuit of simplicity ultimately just makes using WordPress more complicated: you’re still stuck with the WordPress interface for posting. You still see dozens of tiny options when posting, you just have to remember which switches to flip to make your theme display them the right way. Short of building an entirely separate posting interface into the theme, you’re stuck with this. And then you’re really dependent on your theme, too.
So to the user, Tumblr may seem more simple, but for the developers it’s more complicated. The reason all of these choices seem so simple is because they thought them out in advance and built a nice interface to guide you through them.
WordPress, though less so than many applications, often still feels like an interface to a database. Tumblr feels like an interface to a blog. And the motivation for writing a blog post isn’t to “create a post” and then associate various metadata with that post, but to “share links”, “share photos” or even to just “share ideas” in the form of a traditional blog post. So the system is built around those choices.
This isn’t really a critique of WordPress, it just makes different design decisions. By making less decisions about your content for you, it’s more flexible but also more confusing to use. And WordPress is a fairly targeted CMS, too: Drupal or Joomla would really be the ideal foils here. But Drupal’s a full-blown CMS, no apologies. WordPress is a blog-optimized CMS. Tumblr is for blogging. And since part of my job is helping new bloggers figure out WordPress, I can really appreciate the difference this makes in terms of usability and streamlining the day-to-day flow of blogging.
Other stuff
There are other reasons I really like using Tumblr so far: the bookmarklet is great, the Tumblr support in Instapaper is awesome (no coincidence: Tumblr’s lead developer created it), the selection of themes is really good (I keep switching…) and you can write everything in Markdown.
There are things I don’t like as well. I wanted a blog, not another social network. The photosets (which Tumblr automatically creates when you attach multiple photos to a post) kind of suck: they’re small, I hate Flash and there’s no way (that I've found) to turn them off.
There’s also no export, which is a huge problem. Fortunately, there’s a good API, so I decided to put together a backup system before getting all-in. I found a ruby gem, tumblr4r, and (I'm quite proud of myself here) submitted a patch adding photoset support.
Then I wrote a backup script that backs up a tumblelog (including photos). It backs your tumblelog up in a Jekyll-inspired format, which I chose a) for local, archival purposes it’s much nicer for browsing than a single big XML/JSON/SQL file, and also b) if I ever decide to bring these posts into my regular blog here, which is a Jekyll blog, I’ll have the hard work done already.
If that’s overkill for you, there’s an online backup tool that lets you save your tumblelog into one big HTML file.
And, of course, just yesterday, Marco announced an export feature is on the way “in the coming weeks”. Damn.
If Tumblr’s so great…
So why aren’t I posting this on Tumblr? I decided I wanted to split my blog into two (this blog for writing, the tumblr blog for “micro-blogging”, or more simply, “sharing stuff”), and this post is a good example why.
I wrote this over multiple sittings. It’s rather long. I didn’t write this in web browser, but in a text file on my computer. If you've read all of this so far, I don’t have to tell you I like to really dig into the software I use, so I kept a running draft of this going while experimenting with Tumblr. Blogging is a hobby to me, but I like to think of it as writing practice, which does help me with my real job. So “writing practice” is my way of justifying an addiction to technology, basically. (That’s my excuse and I'm sticking to it.)
And I don’t like writing in a web browser. I don’t like having the master copy of my writing on a server accessible only in a web browser (or via blogging clients I can’t manage to like). For the kinds of things I post on Tumblr, I have a different attitude. And having an available-anywhere web service with cool things like a bookmarklet and Instapaper-integration are totally worth it for Tumblelog posts. But I got sick of writing big posts like this and then copying and pasting them into a textarea.
So I've got two blogs now, and yes, I do find it kind of confusing at the moment, but—as is abundantly clear now to everyone who knows me—blogging is often just an excuse to play with the technology for me, so having two completely different systems at my disposal may work quite well for me. I don’t expect most of you share this affliction though, so just go use Tumblr.