9 ms·

Is Tumblr the new WordPress?

51 points by inmygarage 16y ago

fooandbarify 16y ago
I have never known a time where Wordpress was not way more bloated than Tumblr is now, and I've been using Wordpress for about 5 years. That being said, the comparison is only valid when comparing them as services - as far as I know, Tumblr is not available as a platform to use on your own server. (That sucks, because the Tumblr service is extremely unreliable.) As services, though, Tumblr is way more fun to write on.
citricsquid 16y ago
Tumblr is more than a blogging platform though, it's a community, much like Twitter. Tumblr is more like Twitter than it is Wordpress. For example, from what I've seen this is the "average" tumblr user: http://soporslime.tumblr.com/ http://soporslime.tumblr.com/ That is not a traditional blog, not at all.
- TillE 16y ago
  That's frightening. I didn't realize Tumblr was the new MySpace for a certain segment of users. I've only ever seen it used either as a pretty traditional blogging platform, or as a place to dump the occasional photo.
- grinich 16y ago
  Looks a lot like old MySpace.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - devtesla 16y ago
    At least the defaults aren't terrible.They are actually kinda nice. There is the freedom to be terrible, and that's fine by me.
- thesethings 16y ago
  ^^ Agreesies w/citricsquid. (Due to the fact that it's highly customizable, Tumblr gets compared to MySpace. But paradoxically, due to the fact that many of its early adopters are wburg hipsters w/great taste, it also has a rep for having excellent design biases. Checkout the default themes. Gorgeous.) But it truly is more like Twitter (or even Facebook) than MySpace due to the fact that it's for publishing (or sharing) content more than pimping a profile. This is very hard to see from "the outside" (where people are more likely to compare it to Wordpress because it's "just a blog"). But what you don't know until you use it, is that more than half the party is inside the system. The Tumblr themes are never even seen because you're experiencing your friends + followers through a Dashboard view. You're Liking, Reblogging (not too unlike retweeting), adding commentary, asking questions (that are hidden on the outside), squeeing over famous followers, etc. Tumblr, like Twitter is a place. You can interact with people w/out asking them to visit your-site-somewhere-else. Unlike Twitter, is has the advantage of also being a destination. That link you're sharing? That essay you wrote? It's all right here, still on the Tumblr. [edit: Businesses see its popularity. Tumblr has as many users as Twitter did two years ago. IBM, The Economist, The Today Show (!?), most Conde Nast magazines, YC start-ups like Convore, high-end hotels... I've seen 'em all on Tumblr.] As for what the original post is about: It's a fair question. Tumblr is easier than WP. But that's not why it's popular. It's the social part. While we wait for our utopian federated, distributed social networks to arrive, these centralized places are pretty great.
- nchlswu 16y ago
  This is a hugely overlooked point. There's a huge variety of simple blogging tools, but Tumblr's difference is the simplicity combined with the community. The ability to reblog with simplicity is a huge part of their success.
cheez 16y ago
Tumblr is the new Twitter/MySpace/Facebook. Wordpress is a publishing platform. Tumblr is a communication platform.
Apocryphon 16y ago
Microblogging is the new blogging?
- jacques_chester 16y ago
  Personally I think that nanoblogging will change everything. I'm going to launch a site where the interface consists only of a selection of emoticons.
  - kongqiu 16y ago
    Picoblogging FTW!
    - jacques_chester 16y ago
      Seen on HN circa late 2013: Yoctoblogging poised to disrupt Microfacegle (techcrunch.com)
kmfrk 16y ago
No. >Remember when WordPress was criticized for being “just a simple blogging platform”? Have WordPress really ever been called that? The admin/settings interface is ridiculous.
- patrickaljord 16y ago
  > Have WordPress really ever been called that? Yes it has. When compared to drupal and the like, people used to say it only did one thing (blogging) and did it well. I think this is still true.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
jessedhillon 16y ago
Has anyone ever looked at the internals of WP? You'll find all of the worst practices known in PHP development (which I find to be a bad practice all it's own). Maybe it's bias, but I can't imagine people who write such poor code being able to compete with a startup that actually uses technology competently (which may or may not be Tumblr). In this case the question is more about whether Tumblr serves a specific need better than WP and not apparently about technical superiority. Still, again, if you can infer anything about the minds behind WP from the code they write then these guys are creating an app that was cutting-edge innovative maybe ten years ago. For God's sake they don't even have a proper separation of logic from presentation.
- jedsmith 16y ago
  Though I mostly agree, I sincerely hate this, and this isn't the first time I've seen it: > but I can't imagine people who write such poor code being able to compete with a startup that actually uses technology competently It's a pretty big jump from coding quality to inability to run a startup. You're assuming it's the same people, for one, and history has shown us that code quality has nothing to do with startup success. In this specific case, doesn't Wordpress contribute useful high-scalability software back to the community? I'm drawing a blank but I seem to remember something like that.
  - jessedhillon 16y ago
    > It's a pretty big jump from coding quality to inability to run a startup. Would you say that the general cluelessness of the people at MySpace was totally coincidental to the fact that they were probably the largest user of ColdFusion? You mised my point: it was not that code quality causes startup fail but that poor technology choices are symptomatic or correlated with fail. For one, it impairs their ability to change the focus of their product. Take, for example, the ability of their platform to support user-specified data models instead of simply posts, pages and comments. This was an ability that many users were requesting or implementing themselves (or working around) for many versions. It was only implemented in version 3.0, not even a year ago. This is something that is trivial to support on any system designed around proper MVC principles. A well-designed competitor could have had this years ago. From all this and more, I conclude that WP is vulnerable to disruption by a technologically superior product.
Legion 16y ago
I don't think it's Tumblr, but what about Posterous? For websites where the blog is just a part of the site and not the central component, Wordpress is overkill. And maintenance of updates and plugin updates is a pain once you start getting beyond one or two installs. I've been thinking that it's time to reevaluate the blogging options out there rather than defaulting to a big-ass Wordpress install for every client that just wants a simple blog as part of their site.
- Jarred 16y ago
  Postereus is pretty much Tumblr for 20-somethings. From what I've seen most of the people who have blogs in Tumblr are the generation prior to Postereus.
  - ianbishop 16y ago
    I would make the argument (as a 20-something) that there are far more 20-somethings on Tumblr than there will ever be on Posterous. Posterous has always felt, in its design, to be minimal and content based. It is not about posting cool photos you found online, funny youtube clips and a quote out of the book you're reading. That's what 20-somethings are doing with tumblr.
- jacques_chester 16y ago
  You can just as easily get a domain to point to a wordpress.com blog.
seldo 16y ago
I do not understand why successful technology companies, seeing another different but also successful technology, realize "we can do that too" and immediately assume "and therefore we should". Microsoft sees Google being a search engine and sinks billions upon billions into failing to be one. Google sees Facebook being social and decides it needs to be social (an upcoming disaster). Facebook sees Twitter being real-time and decides it needs a real-time stream too (a bad idea they have since buried under the "most recent" link). In the CMS world, we have Drupal for complicated content-management, Wordpress for full-featured blogs, and Tumblr for drop-dead-simple blogs. There is no reason one of these products should try to fill all three roles, and no practical way to do so (because it is, I posit, impossible to be both as simple as Tumblr and as configurable as Drupal). Wordpress is great. It is the leader in its category. There's no need for it to try jumping into another category that would distract from its core competency.
- bergie 16y ago
  ...which is why I've found it weird that people try to shoehorn WordPress to become a full-blown CMS platform. There are better tools for that, and the effort detracts from the strong points of WordPress in blogging
  - ams6110 16y ago
    People tend to reach for familiar tools first, even if they're not really the right ones. They go with what they know.
  - chc 16y ago
    Having looked at the field numerous times when building and advising on websites for smallish newspapers and magazines, I have yet to actually find a better CMS platform for the common use case of "I want to publish articles, plus some other additional stuff on the side," since that matches the actual structure of a WordPress-based CMS.
- rhizome 16y ago
  It is an article of faith in contemporary business that a company not integrating vertically or horizontally is doomed. The Peter Principle, the tail wagging the dog, take your pick: the lesson has been learned everywhere but the board room.
brackin 16y ago
I think it is, it's really easy to create a theme or port a static site over to make it dynamic. Half of tumblr's users are teen girls but they are geeks so they make lot's available for us geeks to use it to hack.
kariatx 16y ago
It's the new LiveJournal, and I mean that in the best possible way.
bad_user 16y ago
No.
Tichy 16y ago
If only Tumblr would work well, I would love to switch, and move all my family to Tumblr, too. But somehow the fancy interface never works when I try it.
ig1 16y ago
I've had blogs on LiveJournal, Wordpress, Blogger, Posterous and Tumblr, and here's my view on the difference: Livejournal: The proto-Facebook, for personal blogging and sharing your thoughts/lives with your friends, with a personal connection with the people who follow you. Wordpress.com/Blogger: Mainstream blogging, letting you share your opinion with the world. I switched from Wordpress.com to Blogger because they inject ads into your blogs. Neither have great editing interfaces. Posterous: Mainstream blogging simplified, I switched from Blogger to Posterous because it just works. I can write a post insert images and it will come out looking decent (on Blogger/Wordpress I have to spend far longer tweaking layout, etc.). Tumblr: Single media micro-blogging, Tumblrs support for mixed media blogging is very poor, you have a photo or a block of text, but not both. It's much more about community as well, it's closer to Twitter than to the other blogging platforms. It's all about followers and re-blogging other peoples posts.
kylec 16y ago
As interesting as Tumblr is, I'm extremely wary of switching to it because of the downtime issues they've had: http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/12/17/the-most-reliable-and-unreliable-blogging-services-2/ http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/12/17/the-most-reliable-and-un...
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
diN0bot 16y ago
in an ideal codebase, such as might result from vertical-slice features being added iteratively plus thoughtfully designed features, feature groups and permissions, could a mature product like wordpress not present different levels of simplicity? "enable simple blogging only" v "enable full cms" I have first hand experience with this and I think it is not only possible, but a reasonable goal for any well designed product. (the advantage of dynamic feature walls is already a huge win)
- jacques_chester 16y ago
  Wordpress, like Microsoft, are bound by the golden anchor of backwards-compatability. One of their big selling points -- the multitude of themes and plugins -- is also what prevents them from making any radical architectural improvements.
  - calvin 16y ago
    They're dumping PHP4 and MySQL4 support in WordPress 3.2. You're right, they have to consider support for existing themes and plugins, but they're not chained to the past.
    - jacques_chester 16y ago
      They're going to start using PHP 5 features, but that won't remove the large amount of PHP 4 code they already have. Neither will it remove the vast body of plugins/themes from play, most of which are updated quite sporadically. If there's anything that will cause internal architectural changes, it's the project's general focus on new features over any other goal.
joelrunyon 16y ago
>Putting aside the flack Tumblr has gotten for their downtime issues of late, I love how the author just brushes this off like it's not a big deal. I've tried to use tumblr because everyone goes silly for it, but I wasn't able to even set up an account because the site was down. That's fine for something like twitter but if using tumblr as a publishing tool for my business, what am I supposed to do when it's down? Tumblr? No thanks. I'll take a wordpress site on my own servers all day long. If I really want some other platform to simply publish on, posterous is drop dead simple and doesn't go down. But, that's just my .02...
shortformblog 16y ago
I feel like I have pretty good insight on this issue. I actually use both. WordPress is my backend for Tumblr. I run a news blog called ShortFormBlog ( http://shortformblog.tumblr.com/ http://shortformblog.tumblr.com/ ), which has content that works well on Tumblr but requires a more robust approach in terms of the creation of the content due to the fact that the posts tend to be more graphical in nature. Which is where WordPress comes in. It has a lot of benefits. When breaking news happens, I don't have to cover every piece of the story … I can reblog the missing pieces from other news Tumblrs. And if I want to do more detailed posts, I can switch back to my customized WordPress backend, which has a modified version of TinyMCE and Tumblrize to allow me to do more design-heavy posts. I also get to keep an archive of the stuff that took more time so it's held in a non-centralized place. The overall benefit? At 6,000 followers and counting in just six months, I have a much larger audience than I ever did with the WordPress site. There's much more communication with readers, and since it's centralized as opposed to all over the place, it's easier to latch onto. I also have gotten some media coverage from Mashable and Mediaite, and I've even worked with the Tumblr staff on some things. WordPress has its uses, but Tumblr has major advantages that you can't get with a self-hosted site. The community is there and it's been well-nurtured. That's as good a reason as any to give it your attention.
jacques_chester 16y ago
I refer upvoters to my previous comment on this phenomenon: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2178493 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2178493 The tl;dr version is that fill-in-the-blank linkbait titles are a bit tedious.
erikpukinskis 16y ago
I just moved the SproutRobot blog from Blogger to Tumblr for one reason: People share stuff on Tumblr. No one really shares stuff on blogs. You can add a "tweet this" or "like this" button to your blog posts, but the only way to get Tumblr kids passing your stuff around is to have a tumblr. Moving away from Blogger (or Wordpress) doesn't seem to sacrifice any shareability, which is the singular purpose of blogging.
strebel 16y ago
Nice dialog. Thanks for the good conversation around this topic. Glad it sparked some feedback.

51 points by inmygarage 16y ago

I have never known a time where Wordpress was not way more bloated than Tumblr is now, and I've been using Wordpress for about 5 years. That being said, the comparison is only valid when comparing them as services - as far as I know, Tumblr is not available as a platform to use on your own server. (That sucks, because the Tumblr service is extremely unreliable.) As services, though, Tumblr is way more fun to write on.

citricsquid 16y ago

Tumblr is more than a blogging platform though, it's a community, much like Twitter. Tumblr is more like Twitter than it is Wordpress. For example, from what I've seen this is the "average" tumblr user: http://soporslime.tumblr.com/ http://soporslime.tumblr.com/ That is not a traditional blog, not at all.

TillE 16y ago
That's frightening. I didn't realize Tumblr was the new MySpace for a certain segment of users. I've only ever seen it used either as a pretty traditional blogging platform, or as a place to dump the occasional photo.
grinich 16y ago
Looks a lot like old MySpace.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- devtesla 16y ago
  At least the defaults aren't terrible.They are actually kinda nice. There is the freedom to be terrible, and that's fine by me.
thesethings 16y ago
^^ Agreesies w/citricsquid. (Due to the fact that it's highly customizable, Tumblr gets compared to MySpace. But paradoxically, due to the fact that many of its early adopters are wburg hipsters w/great taste, it also has a rep for having excellent design biases. Checkout the default themes. Gorgeous.) But it truly is more like Twitter (or even Facebook) than MySpace due to the fact that it's for publishing (or sharing) content more than pimping a profile. This is very hard to see from "the outside" (where people are more likely to compare it to Wordpress because it's "just a blog"). But what you don't know until you use it, is that more than half the party is inside the system. The Tumblr themes are never even seen because you're experiencing your friends + followers through a Dashboard view. You're Liking, Reblogging (not too unlike retweeting), adding commentary, asking questions (that are hidden on the outside), squeeing over famous followers, etc. Tumblr, like Twitter is a place. You can interact with people w/out asking them to visit your-site-somewhere-else. Unlike Twitter, is has the advantage of also being a destination. That link you're sharing? That essay you wrote? It's all right here, still on the Tumblr. [edit: Businesses see its popularity. Tumblr has as many users as Twitter did two years ago. IBM, The Economist, The Today Show (!?), most Conde Nast magazines, YC start-ups like Convore, high-end hotels... I've seen 'em all on Tumblr.] As for what the original post is about: It's a fair question. Tumblr is easier than WP. But that's not why it's popular. It's the social part. While we wait for our utopian federated, distributed social networks to arrive, these centralized places are pretty great.
nchlswu 16y ago
This is a hugely overlooked point. There's a huge variety of simple blogging tools, but Tumblr's difference is the simplicity combined with the community. The ability to reblog with simplicity is a huge part of their success.

cheez 16y ago

Tumblr is the new Twitter/MySpace/Facebook. Wordpress is a publishing platform. Tumblr is a communication platform.

Apocryphon 16y ago

Microblogging is the new blogging?

jacques_chester 16y ago
Personally I think that nanoblogging will change everything. I'm going to launch a site where the interface consists only of a selection of emoticons.
- kongqiu 16y ago
  Picoblogging FTW!
  - jacques_chester 16y ago
    Seen on HN circa late 2013: Yoctoblogging poised to disrupt Microfacegle (techcrunch.com)

kmfrk 16y ago

No. >Remember when WordPress was criticized for being “just a simple blogging platform”? Have WordPress really ever been called that? The admin/settings interface is ridiculous.

patrickaljord 16y ago
> Have WordPress really ever been called that? Yes it has. When compared to drupal and the like, people used to say it only did one thing (blogging) and did it well. I think this is still true.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

jessedhillon 16y ago

Has anyone ever looked at the internals of WP? You'll find all of the worst practices known in PHP development (which I find to be a bad practice all it's own). Maybe it's bias, but I can't imagine people who write such poor code being able to compete with a startup that actually uses technology competently (which may or may not be Tumblr). In this case the question is more about whether Tumblr serves a specific need better than WP and not apparently about technical superiority. Still, again, if you can infer anything about the minds behind WP from the code they write then these guys are creating an app that was cutting-edge innovative maybe ten years ago. For God's sake they don't even have a proper separation of logic from presentation.

jedsmith 16y ago
Though I mostly agree, I sincerely hate this, and this isn't the first time I've seen it: > but I can't imagine people who write such poor code being able to compete with a startup that actually uses technology competently It's a pretty big jump from coding quality to inability to run a startup. You're assuming it's the same people, for one, and history has shown us that code quality has nothing to do with startup success. In this specific case, doesn't Wordpress contribute useful high-scalability software back to the community? I'm drawing a blank but I seem to remember something like that.
- jessedhillon 16y ago
  > It's a pretty big jump from coding quality to inability to run a startup. Would you say that the general cluelessness of the people at MySpace was totally coincidental to the fact that they were probably the largest user of ColdFusion? You mised my point: it was not that code quality causes startup fail but that poor technology choices are symptomatic or correlated with fail. For one, it impairs their ability to change the focus of their product. Take, for example, the ability of their platform to support user-specified data models instead of simply posts, pages and comments. This was an ability that many users were requesting or implementing themselves (or working around) for many versions. It was only implemented in version 3.0, not even a year ago. This is something that is trivial to support on any system designed around proper MVC principles. A well-designed competitor could have had this years ago. From all this and more, I conclude that WP is vulnerable to disruption by a technologically superior product.

Legion 16y ago

I don't think it's Tumblr, but what about Posterous? For websites where the blog is just a part of the site and not the central component, Wordpress is overkill. And maintenance of updates and plugin updates is a pain once you start getting beyond one or two installs. I've been thinking that it's time to reevaluate the blogging options out there rather than defaulting to a big-ass Wordpress install for every client that just wants a simple blog as part of their site.

Jarred 16y ago
Postereus is pretty much Tumblr for 20-somethings. From what I've seen most of the people who have blogs in Tumblr are the generation prior to Postereus.
- ianbishop 16y ago
  I would make the argument (as a 20-something) that there are far more 20-somethings on Tumblr than there will ever be on Posterous. Posterous has always felt, in its design, to be minimal and content based. It is not about posting cool photos you found online, funny youtube clips and a quote out of the book you're reading. That's what 20-somethings are doing with tumblr.
jacques_chester 16y ago
You can just as easily get a domain to point to a wordpress.com blog.

seldo 16y ago

I do not understand why successful technology companies, seeing another different but also successful technology, realize "we can do that too" and immediately assume "and therefore we should". Microsoft sees Google being a search engine and sinks billions upon billions into failing to be one. Google sees Facebook being social and decides it needs to be social (an upcoming disaster). Facebook sees Twitter being real-time and decides it needs a real-time stream too (a bad idea they have since buried under the "most recent" link). In the CMS world, we have Drupal for complicated content-management, Wordpress for full-featured blogs, and Tumblr for drop-dead-simple blogs. There is no reason one of these products should try to fill all three roles, and no practical way to do so (because it is, I posit, impossible to be both as simple as Tumblr and as configurable as Drupal). Wordpress is great. It is the leader in its category. There's no need for it to try jumping into another category that would distract from its core competency.

bergie 16y ago
...which is why I've found it weird that people try to shoehorn WordPress to become a full-blown CMS platform. There are better tools for that, and the effort detracts from the strong points of WordPress in blogging
- ams6110 16y ago
  People tend to reach for familiar tools first, even if they're not really the right ones. They go with what they know.
- chc 16y ago
  Having looked at the field numerous times when building and advising on websites for smallish newspapers and magazines, I have yet to actually find a better CMS platform for the common use case of "I want to publish articles, plus some other additional stuff on the side," since that matches the actual structure of a WordPress-based CMS.
rhizome 16y ago
It is an article of faith in contemporary business that a company not integrating vertically or horizontally is doomed. The Peter Principle, the tail wagging the dog, take your pick: the lesson has been learned everywhere but the board room.

brackin 16y ago

I think it is, it's really easy to create a theme or port a static site over to make it dynamic. Half of tumblr's users are teen girls but they are geeks so they make lot's available for us geeks to use it to hack.

kariatx 16y ago

It's the new LiveJournal, and I mean that in the best possible way.

bad_user 16y ago

No.

Tichy 16y ago

If only Tumblr would work well, I would love to switch, and move all my family to Tumblr, too. But somehow the fancy interface never works when I try it.

ig1 16y ago

I've had blogs on LiveJournal, Wordpress, Blogger, Posterous and Tumblr, and here's my view on the difference: Livejournal: The proto-Facebook, for personal blogging and sharing your thoughts/lives with your friends, with a personal connection with the people who follow you. Wordpress.com/Blogger: Mainstream blogging, letting you share your opinion with the world. I switched from Wordpress.com to Blogger because they inject ads into your blogs. Neither have great editing interfaces. Posterous: Mainstream blogging simplified, I switched from Blogger to Posterous because it just works. I can write a post insert images and it will come out looking decent (on Blogger/Wordpress I have to spend far longer tweaking layout, etc.). Tumblr: Single media micro-blogging, Tumblrs support for mixed media blogging is very poor, you have a photo or a block of text, but not both. It's much more about community as well, it's closer to Twitter than to the other blogging platforms. It's all about followers and re-blogging other peoples posts.

kylec 16y ago

As interesting as Tumblr is, I'm extremely wary of switching to it because of the downtime issues they've had: http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/12/17/the-most-reliable-and-unreliable-blogging-services-2/ http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/12/17/the-most-reliable-and-un...

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

diN0bot 16y ago

in an ideal codebase, such as might result from vertical-slice features being added iteratively plus thoughtfully designed features, feature groups and permissions, could a mature product like wordpress not present different levels of simplicity? "enable simple blogging only" v "enable full cms" I have first hand experience with this and I think it is not only possible, but a reasonable goal for any well designed product. (the advantage of dynamic feature walls is already a huge win)

jacques_chester 16y ago
Wordpress, like Microsoft, are bound by the golden anchor of backwards-compatability. One of their big selling points -- the multitude of themes and plugins -- is also what prevents them from making any radical architectural improvements.
- calvin 16y ago
  They're dumping PHP4 and MySQL4 support in WordPress 3.2. You're right, they have to consider support for existing themes and plugins, but they're not chained to the past.
  - jacques_chester 16y ago
    They're going to start using PHP 5 features, but that won't remove the large amount of PHP 4 code they already have. Neither will it remove the vast body of plugins/themes from play, most of which are updated quite sporadically. If there's anything that will cause internal architectural changes, it's the project's general focus on new features over any other goal.

joelrunyon 16y ago

>Putting aside the flack Tumblr has gotten for their downtime issues of late, I love how the author just brushes this off like it's not a big deal. I've tried to use tumblr because everyone goes silly for it, but I wasn't able to even set up an account because the site was down. That's fine for something like twitter but if using tumblr as a publishing tool for my business, what am I supposed to do when it's down? Tumblr? No thanks. I'll take a wordpress site on my own servers all day long. If I really want some other platform to simply publish on, posterous is drop dead simple and doesn't go down. But, that's just my .02...

shortformblog 16y ago

I feel like I have pretty good insight on this issue. I actually use both. WordPress is my backend for Tumblr. I run a news blog called ShortFormBlog ( http://shortformblog.tumblr.com/ http://shortformblog.tumblr.com/ ), which has content that works well on Tumblr but requires a more robust approach in terms of the creation of the content due to the fact that the posts tend to be more graphical in nature. Which is where WordPress comes in. It has a lot of benefits. When breaking news happens, I don't have to cover every piece of the story … I can reblog the missing pieces from other news Tumblrs. And if I want to do more detailed posts, I can switch back to my customized WordPress backend, which has a modified version of TinyMCE and Tumblrize to allow me to do more design-heavy posts. I also get to keep an archive of the stuff that took more time so it's held in a non-centralized place. The overall benefit? At 6,000 followers and counting in just six months, I have a much larger audience than I ever did with the WordPress site. There's much more communication with readers, and since it's centralized as opposed to all over the place, it's easier to latch onto. I also have gotten some media coverage from Mashable and Mediaite, and I've even worked with the Tumblr staff on some things. WordPress has its uses, but Tumblr has major advantages that you can't get with a self-hosted site. The community is there and it's been well-nurtured. That's as good a reason as any to give it your attention.

jacques_chester 16y ago

I refer upvoters to my previous comment on this phenomenon: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2178493 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2178493 The tl;dr version is that fill-in-the-blank linkbait titles are a bit tedious.

erikpukinskis 16y ago

I just moved the SproutRobot blog from Blogger to Tumblr for one reason: People share stuff on Tumblr. No one really shares stuff on blogs. You can add a "tweet this" or "like this" button to your blog posts, but the only way to get Tumblr kids passing your stuff around is to have a tumblr. Moving away from Blogger (or Wordpress) doesn't seem to sacrifice any shareability, which is the singular purpose of blogging.

strebel 16y ago

Nice dialog. Thanks for the good conversation around this topic. Glad it sparked some feedback.