6 ms·

Startups: Don't Host Your Blog on Tumblr

163 points by PStamatiou 15y ago

citricsquid 15y ago
A mistake people seem to make is assuming Tumblr is a blogging platform akin to Wordpress.com, it isn't, it's a different beast entirely. The majority of Tumblr is the "community" of ~teenagers sharing pictures and videos and posts, Tumblr revolves around the dashboard not individual blogs. Sure you can host your company blog there, but do tumblr care about the uptime of that vs. the uptime of their dashboard?
- PStamatiou 15y ago
  Agreed and I use tumblr a lot for my personal reblog http://stammy.com http://stammy.com but I wouldn't host any important startup blog stuff there.
- notJim 15y ago
  Yeah, I've always been surprised that people consider Tumblr as a platform for anything except hosting short posts (pictures/videos/clips/quotes/etc.) The brevity it [to me] encourages (plus the social features it has) places it somewhere closer to the Twitter side of a continuum between Twitter and Wordpress or Blogger. This is mostly in my head, of course, but I just didn't realize others felt differently until somewhat recently.
- phzbOx 15y ago
  "A mistake people seem to make is assuming Tumblr is a blogging platform akin to Wordpress.com, it isn't, it's a different beast entirely." From their about page: "What is Tumblr? Millions of people sharing the things they do, find, love, think, or create." Even if you can do more than a simple blog with tumblr, at its base it is a blogging platform. It's perfect for a startup that is busy doing lots of other things... if it wasn't for the fact that it's always down. I hope they'll someday add a "Always Up and running, no trouble" to their "30 reasons you'll love tumblr".
  - sabret00the 15y ago
    No, it's a micro-blogging platform. Traditional blog posts are something that have been shoehorned in to try and garner new audiences. Tumblr is never the right choice for an existing publication. That's why many fashion magazines have Tumblrs that run alongside their traditional blogs.
- flomo 15y ago
  There is enough porn on Tumblr that I would assume it's being blocked by many corporate firewalls. (Not to mention blanket bans on social networking sites.) Probably not a place I would put marketing material.
  - Leynos 15y ago
    It's certainly blocked at my workplace.
    - zizee 15y ago
      But that's just blogs on the tumblr domain. If it is on a subdomain I'd imagine it's not blocked.
  - erikpukinskis 15y ago
    If you host your blog on something.yourdomain.com, it'll be accessible even if tumblr isn't, right?
  - zizee 15y ago
    Do most corporate firewalls do deep packet inspection? I think that they'd mostly just be blocking domains based on a blacklist, or with a regex. Since most startups would be using a subdomain of their own domain for their tumblr blog, so I don't think this is an issue.
iamdave 15y ago
Akshay noticed I was so annoyed with Tumblr that he suggested I write this post detailing our move and urging other startups to do the same. As much as this is a very staunch gesture, I think it's a very valid one. Tumblr has a huge, active, and connected community. It can be a great entry point for niche startups to find users and build an audience, but the performance and stability just does not cut the mustard. I greatly want tumblr to succeed, their platform is very fresh, the theme garden model they have fits their mold perfectly (although the premium marketplace seems to be extremely esoteric) but I also hope this suggestion for startups to choose an alternative platform kicks tumblr in some sort of direction to improve the QoS.
- kmfrk 15y ago
  It is still possible to create a Tumblr blog that pulls the RSS from your site, though. You can just tell it to only display the URL and title so you don't get an SEO mess. Not perfect, of course, but it still gives you a slight chance to use Tumblr's amazing sharing platform.
  - iamdave 15y ago
    You are correct. That's actually one of my favorite features tumblr has, it reminds me much of a site I used back in the 2000's called SideBlog. It worked exactly the same way, drop in a line of javascript and it pulled in your posts and you could design everything around it. This kind of reinforces my earlier commentary, tumblr has some great features and awesome integration, but their performance and reliability always make me steer clear when needing to put up a blog for a client.
nodesocket 15y ago
We (NodeSocket) are on Posterous; and so far so good. Love the fact that if a post makes the HN front page, we don't have to worry about scaling or downtime. Also, it was super easy to select a theme and modify some basic CSS rules to match our branding and website. Finally, they have some nice nerdy features as well; GitHub Gists and Vimeos automatically converted from a URL to embed.
- lyime 15y ago
  I used Posterous for our blogs for Mugasha and they were great. Highly recommended if you want to avoid self hosted.
- TWSS 15y ago
  Another vote for Posterous. I also like the simple customization, and the fact that I can easily add new members/contributors - a nice feature for a company blog.
- charliesome 15y ago
  > Love the fact that if a post makes the HN front page, we don't have to worry about scaling or downtime. If you have to worry about scaling or downtime if a blog post hits HN's front page, then I'm afraid that you screwed up really bad somewhere. Any server should be able to handle that traffic.
  - nodesocket 15y ago
    See: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3451893 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3451893, scaling Wordpress isn't exactly easy, when running on shared hosting.
airlocksoftware 15y ago
Weird. I can't remember ever having trouble loading a tumblr blog. I wonder what accounts for our different experiences?
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- littledude 15y ago
  maybe it's because of the location of the servers? they seem to be west coast, i'm east coast and can't remember the last time i had trouble loading a tumblr blog
callmeed 15y ago
Since when is a startup's corporate blog mission-critical? PicPlum's recent blog posts seem to be pretty run-of-the mill ... press mentions, tips, new features, etc. Nothing that (a) would hurt the company if the blog was down or (b) you couldn't simply use your company Facebook page for.
- PStamatiou 15y ago
  Agreed, we didn't have anything too interesting in recent past but we're going to start ramping that up. Especially after checking out rand fishkin's presentation about inbound marketing.
  - jamesjyu 15y ago
    +1,000,000 to rand's presentation. Here's the link in case you missed it: http://hackersandfounders.tv/RDmt/rand-fishkin-inbound-marketing-for-startups/ http://hackersandfounders.tv/RDmt/rand-fishkin-inbound-marke... We are big believers in making quality content at Parse as well. Interruption marketing is annoying and not nearly as effective. Given that, it's pretty crucial for our blog to be up as well. (we're also on jekyll, hosted on our own servers)
- ebiester 15y ago
  On the other hand, when I'm looking around for a service and I' trying to figure out whether I should spend cash on a company, I do check out the blog. A blog that goes down, in my head, is a service that goes down, even if I know it to be untrue objectively.
- notJim 15y ago
  I dunno, it's definitely part of their brand. I would sort-of think twice before trusting a company that couldn't even keep a simple blog up-and-running. 3rd parties don't necessarily know or notice that it's hosted by tumblr.
- kmfrk 15y ago
  It's ironic that this was just submitted to Hacker News: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3468974 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3468974. Aside from unexpected incidents (and limited offers), you'll be fine. But if something goes wrong, you don't want panic and misinformation to ensue. It all depends on your kind of company, of course.
sunsu 15y ago
I use google plus along with a simple tool I made for a really simple blog that's hosted on my domain: https://github.com/lylepratt/Plusify https://github.com/lylepratt/Plusify
ggwicz 15y ago
I don't see the problem with sticking with Tumblr. What most of the trouble with my Tumblr-powered sites seems to be is the use of Tumblr's Static Media uploader (http://www.tumblr.com/themes/upload_static_file http://www.tumblr.com/themes/upload_static_file) which is used for js files, external css, images, etc. Sites (in my experience!) with a lot of these links have way more loading problems. Simple sites that rely more on markup and CSS3 than images and a lot of JavaScript have only dropped out a few times in my experience. Just my two cents, maybe somebody can comment and verify this.
iamclovin 15y ago
We recently moved our dev blog (dev.anideo.com) to jekyll + github pages as well, not because of problems with uptime but because gist support is a major pita on Tumblr and we primarily use our blog to post code snippets.
smalter 15y ago
Like most things, choosing where to host your company blog is a strategic choice that can't be boiled down to a categorical. tumblr has a really amazing community. tumblr's downtime is a fact. The question is, does the community outweigh the downtime? I think you make this decision based on the demographics of the tumblr community vis-a-vis your users / customers. And tumblr isn't just 14 year old girls -- there's a bunch of tech people on it (although that may be more NYC tech). In the comments, people have mentioned the simple fact that you can have both a self-hosted company blog and a company tumblr, much like most companies have a company blog and a company twitter. I agree, although simply feeding content from the blog into the tumblr of course doesn't make best use of tumblr as a platform. My startup's blog is on tumblr (http://blog.idonethis.com http://blog.idonethis.com) and we get about 1/5 of the referral traffic of twitter and facebook from tumblr. (We have nearly 1k followers on tumblr versus 1.6k twitter followers and 2k facebook likes.) In other words, it's our 3rd largest source of referral traffic from social media.
- thesethings 15y ago
  Well put. I do marketing work on a few projects that have commercial blogs. In mose cases, we're able to get 1K+ Tumblr followers in < 3 months (not counting "regular" RSS subscribers). (And none of the projects are famous/have famous founders/services/products) To get the same amount of regular RSS subscribers is much more difficult. Tumblr is comparable to Twitter in that it's a common place to meet your readers/customers. Unlike a self-hosted blog, you don't have to ask visitors to leave where they are to visit you. So you're likely to get a bit more foot traffic/interaction, not to mention people passing it on/sharing it out (via reblogs). Now if you're an already established service/otherwise famous, you might have no problem getting people to check you out. But even then, Tumblr has its benefits. I don't think the choice is necessarily all or nothing between self-hosted or Tumblr. Many companies with "real" blogs also have Tumblrs. In many cases companies have multiple Tumblrs. (Not unlike Twitter, it's becoming common to have a separate Tumblr for different events/products/branches/divisions. IBM has at least 3. NBC has at least 4...) I won't disagree that Tumblr has horrible performance issues. But it's still worth it. Twitter 3 years ago had bad performance issues, but it was/is still definitely investing in. No social site is forever, but they're great tools as long as you're aware of costs + benefits.
zizee 15y ago
Another problem with hosting with Tumblr is that you can't host the blog on the same domain as your app. The usual solution is to host the blog at blog.example.com. The problem with this is that subdomains are treated by google as a separate domain, so any google juice flowing to your blog does not help your main domain. With SEO, one of the most important things is incoming links and if you split your incoming links across multiple domains, the sum is actually less than the whole. The best solution is to host your blog in a subfolder on your main domain (e.g. example.com/blog).
- chlee 15y ago
  Are there blog hosting services that one can use in a subfolder? AFAIK, both tumblr and posterous only supports subdomains but not folders.
  - zizee 15y ago
    Unfortunately not. I don't think this is actually possible as I don't think you can have a subfolder of a site hosted elsewhere (not in a 'performant' manner at least). The only solution that I know of is to host it all on the one box which makes it trick if you want to use Heroku to host your app. I am currently wrestling with this problem as I want to host a new app on Heroku, but have the marketing side of the site powered by wordpress to take advantage of things like third party themes. The app will also generate linkable content, so it is important to me to have it on the same domain, but there seems to be no way to achieve what I want to do with heroku :-( So annoying!
    - SingAlong 15y ago
      Did you try the Cedar stack?
      - zizee 15y ago
        Well, you can host PHP on a cedar stack, and I have successfully deployed wordpress to heroku, so that is very cool. It was actually really easy with this: https://github.com/mhoofman/wordpress-heroku https://github.com/mhoofman/wordpress-heroku But unfortuently, to the best of my knowledge, you can't host both PHP at the same time as Rails. If anyone know otherwise I would love to hear!
deleted 15y ago
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- joshu 15y ago
  Which you run. Please disclose. http://blog.trillsy.com/@kerryusry http://blog.trillsy.com/@kerryusry
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - kerryusry 15y ago
    Another option that is out there in beta now is http://trillsy.com http://trillsy.com. You can use existing themes or your own design, it offers more user features, multiple contributors or posting from the public and also has an post type for events with an event calendar. It is worth checking out, beta keys are going out. In the interest of full disclosure this is my service, sorry about missing that when first posting.
    - getsat 15y ago
      Free trial... wait, I need a beta key? Where are the plans/prices?
      - kerryusry 15y ago
        The free trial will always be there, the beta key is a temporary requirement, a gate if you will, and extends the trial period. Plans are not entirely set, the entry plan will be low but it is not a free service, it is aimed at business primarily not a personal blog.
mvkel 15y ago
I'll take 99.8% uptime over managing an entire blog infrastructure.
- trickjarrett 15y ago
  Out of genuine curiosity, what percent of uptime would be worth managing your own infrastructure?
  - tobtoh 15y ago
    I don't think it's quite a simply answer like X% uptime. A lot of the decision is the 'quality' of the downtime. For example: * Is it generally stable, but only going down in peak load situations (obviously no good if you know peak load occurs when you are doing critical new product release/sales etc, but may be okay if you peak load corresponds to non-critical events). * How long is the outages? If it goes down for 1 minute each day, that may be more acceptable compared to '100%' uptime except one day when it goes out for 365 minutes. All of that affects the impact that the downtime has on your venture - it's quite possible you might have 'poor' uptime stats, but it has zero effect on your business, in which case the cost/effort savings from using a 'poorer uptime' hosted service may be worth it.
    - mvkel 15y ago
      Well put. I echo your sentiments entirely. No point in bending over backwards for 99.999% uptime when it has zero effect on one's business. Priorities...
  - mvkel 15y ago
    I think it's more important to know _when_ the downtime occurs vs. the percentage itself. If the site is down from 12am to 6am due to some botched maintenance, I really don't care, as traffic will be minuscule, if not non-existent for our core market. And 6 hours of downtime is a killer for uptime percentage. The "Jekyll is so easy! It's the easiest thing I've ever maintained!" argument reminds me of Andy Rubin's now infamous quote about the openness of Android: "the definition of open: "mkdir android ; cd android ; repo init -u it://android.git.kernel.org/platform/manifest.git ; repo sync ; make" The point of Tumblr is I don't need to maintain _anything_!
alexwolfe 15y ago
A Tumblr blog may not be the best solution but spending that many resources on a blog (especially one not featured in the main navigation) is usually out of the question for most startups. For most startups the amount of time invested for a custom Jekyll setup and a downtime script could be replaced with a new feature or a better product/home page. I think its important for startups not to spend too much time blogging unless they feel it will provide them some decent traffic and strongly support the product/company. Make the product better first. If your blog host (Tumblr) isn't stable enough, wordpress it and be done with it.
- apsurd 15y ago
  HN'ers have a hard enough time accepting: 'more features' != 'more marketshare' I would caution this making sure to note "it depends on the startup". If your industry pays attention to blogs it's very much worth devoting large amounts of effort to capturing this attention. I as much as the next programmer need the _focus on marketing_ mantra pounded into my head time and time again. See 37signals blog, seomoz blog, and every piece of advice patio11 has ever written.
  - alexwolfe 15y ago
    I certainly don't have a hard time with that. Perhaps reread the comment I left. "unless they feel it will provide them some decent traffic and strongly support the product/company" Not sure you added anything to my previous comment.
- SoftwareMaven 15y ago
  I spent 1/2 a day building a blog (including RSS support). I wanted an integrated visual experience that stayed up to date as the website changed (which it is doing a lot right now) and took advantage of the same underlying db and hosting infrastructure. Trying to do that with a different blog engine would have meant tweaking the blog every day, which would be far more effort.
  - moonlighter 15y ago
paul9290 15y ago
I'm in the amidst of launching my start-up CodePupil.com . What I dig about Tumblr is how fast Google indexes posts from there due to it's popularity. Thus, if your looking to HELP get your start-up's name listed in Google fairly quikcly, then a Tumblr or Posterous would be best to use. I posted a Tumblr "About us," yesterday and Google indexed it eight hours later.
Legion 15y ago
So, in the last week or so of reading Hacker News, I've been told: * Don't blog on Google+ * Don't blog on Tumblr Before I start blogging, are there any others I should know about?
- ohashi 15y ago
  I think ultimately you will see complaints against almost every service and you will be left with one choice. Host your own. And then that has its own shortcomings. So we can conclude that everything has risks no matter what. It's up to you to assess and decide which risks you can tolerate.
- cosmez 15y ago
  how about ignoring everyone and just start to blog? it doesn't matter how you do it right now, just do it and worry about that later.
- resnamen 15y ago
  DIY blogging software made from scratch, in 12 hours, with node.JS and Mongo. Anything else would be too mainstream for HN.
huhtenberg 15y ago
Strangely enough I find that I am more inclined to read company's blog if it is visibly hosted on a dedicated blog site, Tumblr and Posterious included. Based on this observation I did a bit of testing of <product>.tumblr.com vs blog.<product>.com and former generated more foot traffic from Twitter link drops. Haven't tried www.<product>.com/blog though, it might well outperform both options.
abalone 15y ago
Ummm.... they're hosting on HEROKU? In 2011, Tumblr was down for 42 hours. In 2011, Heroku was down for 76 hours in one incident alone. And that's all before you get to the hubris of the assumption that your custom coded setup will perform better. A more sensible argument would be to move to a host with a better proven uptime record, such as Blogger (nearly 100%). Sources: http://allthingsd.com/20111215/tumblr-had-42-hours-of-downtime-in-2011-and-thats-an-improvement/ http://allthingsd.com/20111215/tumblr-had-42-hours-of-downti... https://status.heroku.com/incident/151 https://status.heroku.com/incident/151
- PStamatiou 15y ago
  No biggie, I can temporary move our blog to another host with a simple DNS change and pulling the static site from our repo. Ah, the power of jekyll!
  - theli0nheart 15y ago
    If you're using Jekyll, why not just host with S3/Cloudfront?
    - PStamatiou 15y ago
      I had thought about it but - I wanted to use Sinatra to 301 old tumblr urls - Call me weird but I loathe seeing *.html in urls and that's the only thing you can do with S3 root object (when I checked a few months ago) - something I can't remember. maybe it was cf edge server time to update when altering updates.
      - k7d 15y ago
        > I loathe seeing *.html in urls and that's the only thing you can do with S3 root object You can configure name of index file, and that will be displayed for requests against root URL and subdirectories (such as blog posts) as well. No need for having .html in URLs. The only problem I've encountered with S3 web hosting is that it does not let you host naked domains.
liefe 15y ago
So what is a generally accepted blog back-end if you're self hosting?
akuchlous 15y ago
has anybody tried to crawl tumblr outside of goog?
bountie 15y ago
The problem with Tumblr as a blog is that it's not easy to do straightforward comments
shortformblog 15y ago
I run a news site on Tumblr and I can tell you my downtime problems are nowhere near as bad as this site suggests they are. In the past three months I can remember only one major bout of downtime, and I'm on the site most of the day every day. And in the case that downtime is as bad as it seems, I suggest you guys use CloudFlare, which will at least keep a cached version of your site online even during downtime issues. Tumblr is way more about community than mission-critical uptime. If you treat it like mission-critical uptime, you're going to be disappointed. If you're trying to reach an audience for your application — which, honestly, should be more important with a staff blog — Tumblr is a great bet.
danberger 15y ago
Another reason to not user Tumblr is David Karp's [the founder's] attitude. http://getoffmyinternets.net/2011/05/31/david-karp-will-tell-you-how-to-run-a-company/ http://getoffmyinternets.net/2011/05/31/david-karp-will-tell...
kjackson 15y ago
Is your price really 50 cents per print plus shipping? Costco.com will print for 12 cents per print and free shipping, are you guys going to be able to be competitive against them?
- PStamatiou 15y ago
  Picplum is focusing on quality rather than optimizing on price. Our prints are considerably higher quality with premium archival lustre paper (much thicker), better packaging-- We're selling an experience not cheap prints with an ecommerce add-to-cart-then-select-sizes experience. Happy to report that price has not been an issue and we have many happy return customers. Try it out and let us know what you think! Each new account has $5 in credits.
Sukotto 15y ago
Heroku-hosted custom Jekyll setup I thought Heroku only allowed dynamically-generated content (with static assets hosted elsewhere) But the whole point of Jekyll is that it generates a static site. What am I missing? (seriously) I thought a starter Heroku account might work well for a side project I have cooking... Coincidentally, I was reading about Jekyll as something fun to try. Combining both of them would be pretty cool.
- philwelch 15y ago
  Heroku doesn't actively prevent you from hosting a static site. Yeah, heavy assets like images and video should be hosted elsewhere, but with HTML and stuff it's fine to just throw it in a static Git repo and use Heroku.
  - zizee 15y ago
    The main thing that will stop you is the limit on the "slug size", which is 100mb. This is heaps for static text like html, but if your blog is image intensive you could hit the wall after a while. Video would push you over super quick.
leftnode 15y ago
It does depress me somewhat when I see people writing incredibly insightful or great blog posts on another company's blogging platform. I'd live in constant worry the company could fold up shop one day and your posts would be gone (unless you kept local copies manually). It's your writing, if it is good and insightful, write it on a server you have control over.
- CJefferson 15y ago
  I used to have a blog on my personal domain (not saying it was incredibly insightful), and I got tired of updating wordpress. One day the wordpress update failed, and I just took down the blog and now it is gone. My livejournal blog however, which I set up over 10 years ago (and haven't updated in 7 years) is still there in it's embarassing completeness.
resnamen 15y ago
Somewhat related gripe: does anybody like the admin UI in Tumblr? It seems like important settings are scattered all over the place. I don't understand why the site view and admin views are two discrete locations, either. Has the core service received much love since David Karp's first cut?

163 points by PStamatiou 15y ago

A mistake people seem to make is assuming Tumblr is a blogging platform akin to Wordpress.com, it isn't, it's a different beast entirely. The majority of Tumblr is the "community" of ~teenagers sharing pictures and videos and posts, Tumblr revolves around the dashboard not individual blogs. Sure you can host your company blog there, but do tumblr care about the uptime of that vs. the uptime of their dashboard?

PStamatiou 15y ago
Agreed and I use tumblr a lot for my personal reblog http://stammy.com http://stammy.com but I wouldn't host any important startup blog stuff there.
notJim 15y ago
Yeah, I've always been surprised that people consider Tumblr as a platform for anything except hosting short posts (pictures/videos/clips/quotes/etc.) The brevity it [to me] encourages (plus the social features it has) places it somewhere closer to the Twitter side of a continuum between Twitter and Wordpress or Blogger. This is mostly in my head, of course, but I just didn't realize others felt differently until somewhat recently.
phzbOx 15y ago
"A mistake people seem to make is assuming Tumblr is a blogging platform akin to Wordpress.com, it isn't, it's a different beast entirely." From their about page: "What is Tumblr? Millions of people sharing the things they do, find, love, think, or create." Even if you can do more than a simple blog with tumblr, at its base it is a blogging platform. It's perfect for a startup that is busy doing lots of other things... if it wasn't for the fact that it's always down. I hope they'll someday add a "Always Up and running, no trouble" to their "30 reasons you'll love tumblr".
- sabret00the 15y ago
  No, it's a micro-blogging platform. Traditional blog posts are something that have been shoehorned in to try and garner new audiences. Tumblr is never the right choice for an existing publication. That's why many fashion magazines have Tumblrs that run alongside their traditional blogs.
flomo 15y ago
There is enough porn on Tumblr that I would assume it's being blocked by many corporate firewalls. (Not to mention blanket bans on social networking sites.) Probably not a place I would put marketing material.
- Leynos 15y ago
  It's certainly blocked at my workplace.
  - zizee 15y ago
    But that's just blogs on the tumblr domain. If it is on a subdomain I'd imagine it's not blocked.
- erikpukinskis 15y ago
  If you host your blog on something.yourdomain.com, it'll be accessible even if tumblr isn't, right?
- zizee 15y ago
  Do most corporate firewalls do deep packet inspection? I think that they'd mostly just be blocking domains based on a blacklist, or with a regex. Since most startups would be using a subdomain of their own domain for their tumblr blog, so I don't think this is an issue.

iamdave 15y ago

Akshay noticed I was so annoyed with Tumblr that he suggested I write this post detailing our move and urging other startups to do the same. As much as this is a very staunch gesture, I think it's a very valid one. Tumblr has a huge, active, and connected community. It can be a great entry point for niche startups to find users and build an audience, but the performance and stability just does not cut the mustard. I greatly want tumblr to succeed, their platform is very fresh, the theme garden model they have fits their mold perfectly (although the premium marketplace seems to be extremely esoteric) but I also hope this suggestion for startups to choose an alternative platform kicks tumblr in some sort of direction to improve the QoS.

kmfrk 15y ago
It is still possible to create a Tumblr blog that pulls the RSS from your site, though. You can just tell it to only display the URL and title so you don't get an SEO mess. Not perfect, of course, but it still gives you a slight chance to use Tumblr's amazing sharing platform.
- iamdave 15y ago
  You are correct. That's actually one of my favorite features tumblr has, it reminds me much of a site I used back in the 2000's called SideBlog. It worked exactly the same way, drop in a line of javascript and it pulled in your posts and you could design everything around it. This kind of reinforces my earlier commentary, tumblr has some great features and awesome integration, but their performance and reliability always make me steer clear when needing to put up a blog for a client.

nodesocket 15y ago

We (NodeSocket) are on Posterous; and so far so good. Love the fact that if a post makes the HN front page, we don't have to worry about scaling or downtime. Also, it was super easy to select a theme and modify some basic CSS rules to match our branding and website. Finally, they have some nice nerdy features as well; GitHub Gists and Vimeos automatically converted from a URL to embed.

lyime 15y ago
I used Posterous for our blogs for Mugasha and they were great. Highly recommended if you want to avoid self hosted.
TWSS 15y ago
Another vote for Posterous. I also like the simple customization, and the fact that I can easily add new members/contributors - a nice feature for a company blog.
charliesome 15y ago
> Love the fact that if a post makes the HN front page, we don't have to worry about scaling or downtime. If you have to worry about scaling or downtime if a blog post hits HN's front page, then I'm afraid that you screwed up really bad somewhere. Any server should be able to handle that traffic.
- nodesocket 15y ago
  See: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3451893 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3451893, scaling Wordpress isn't exactly easy, when running on shared hosting.

airlocksoftware 15y ago

Weird. I can't remember ever having trouble loading a tumblr blog. I wonder what accounts for our different experiences?

deleted 15y ago
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littledude 15y ago
maybe it's because of the location of the servers? they seem to be west coast, i'm east coast and can't remember the last time i had trouble loading a tumblr blog

callmeed 15y ago

Since when is a startup's corporate blog mission-critical? PicPlum's recent blog posts seem to be pretty run-of-the mill ... press mentions, tips, new features, etc. Nothing that (a) would hurt the company if the blog was down or (b) you couldn't simply use your company Facebook page for.

PStamatiou 15y ago
Agreed, we didn't have anything too interesting in recent past but we're going to start ramping that up. Especially after checking out rand fishkin's presentation about inbound marketing.
- jamesjyu 15y ago
  +1,000,000 to rand's presentation. Here's the link in case you missed it: http://hackersandfounders.tv/RDmt/rand-fishkin-inbound-marketing-for-startups/ http://hackersandfounders.tv/RDmt/rand-fishkin-inbound-marke... We are big believers in making quality content at Parse as well. Interruption marketing is annoying and not nearly as effective. Given that, it's pretty crucial for our blog to be up as well. (we're also on jekyll, hosted on our own servers)
ebiester 15y ago
On the other hand, when I'm looking around for a service and I' trying to figure out whether I should spend cash on a company, I do check out the blog. A blog that goes down, in my head, is a service that goes down, even if I know it to be untrue objectively.
notJim 15y ago
I dunno, it's definitely part of their brand. I would sort-of think twice before trusting a company that couldn't even keep a simple blog up-and-running. 3rd parties don't necessarily know or notice that it's hosted by tumblr.
kmfrk 15y ago
It's ironic that this was just submitted to Hacker News: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3468974 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3468974. Aside from unexpected incidents (and limited offers), you'll be fine. But if something goes wrong, you don't want panic and misinformation to ensue. It all depends on your kind of company, of course.

sunsu 15y ago

I use google plus along with a simple tool I made for a really simple blog that's hosted on my domain: https://github.com/lylepratt/Plusify https://github.com/lylepratt/Plusify

ggwicz 15y ago

I don't see the problem with sticking with Tumblr. What most of the trouble with my Tumblr-powered sites seems to be is the use of Tumblr's Static Media uploader (http://www.tumblr.com/themes/upload_static_file http://www.tumblr.com/themes/upload_static_file) which is used for js files, external css, images, etc. Sites (in my experience!) with a lot of these links have way more loading problems. Simple sites that rely more on markup and CSS3 than images and a lot of JavaScript have only dropped out a few times in my experience. Just my two cents, maybe somebody can comment and verify this.

iamclovin 15y ago

We recently moved our dev blog (dev.anideo.com) to jekyll + github pages as well, not because of problems with uptime but because gist support is a major pita on Tumblr and we primarily use our blog to post code snippets.

smalter 15y ago

Like most things, choosing where to host your company blog is a strategic choice that can't be boiled down to a categorical. tumblr has a really amazing community. tumblr's downtime is a fact. The question is, does the community outweigh the downtime? I think you make this decision based on the demographics of the tumblr community vis-a-vis your users / customers. And tumblr isn't just 14 year old girls -- there's a bunch of tech people on it (although that may be more NYC tech). In the comments, people have mentioned the simple fact that you can have both a self-hosted company blog and a company tumblr, much like most companies have a company blog and a company twitter. I agree, although simply feeding content from the blog into the tumblr of course doesn't make best use of tumblr as a platform. My startup's blog is on tumblr (http://blog.idonethis.com http://blog.idonethis.com) and we get about 1/5 of the referral traffic of twitter and facebook from tumblr. (We have nearly 1k followers on tumblr versus 1.6k twitter followers and 2k facebook likes.) In other words, it's our 3rd largest source of referral traffic from social media.

thesethings 15y ago
Well put. I do marketing work on a few projects that have commercial blogs. In mose cases, we're able to get 1K+ Tumblr followers in < 3 months (not counting "regular" RSS subscribers). (And none of the projects are famous/have famous founders/services/products) To get the same amount of regular RSS subscribers is much more difficult. Tumblr is comparable to Twitter in that it's a common place to meet your readers/customers. Unlike a self-hosted blog, you don't have to ask visitors to leave where they are to visit you. So you're likely to get a bit more foot traffic/interaction, not to mention people passing it on/sharing it out (via reblogs). Now if you're an already established service/otherwise famous, you might have no problem getting people to check you out. But even then, Tumblr has its benefits. I don't think the choice is necessarily all or nothing between self-hosted or Tumblr. Many companies with "real" blogs also have Tumblrs. In many cases companies have multiple Tumblrs. (Not unlike Twitter, it's becoming common to have a separate Tumblr for different events/products/branches/divisions. IBM has at least 3. NBC has at least 4...) I won't disagree that Tumblr has horrible performance issues. But it's still worth it. Twitter 3 years ago had bad performance issues, but it was/is still definitely investing in. No social site is forever, but they're great tools as long as you're aware of costs + benefits.

zizee 15y ago

Another problem with hosting with Tumblr is that you can't host the blog on the same domain as your app. The usual solution is to host the blog at blog.example.com. The problem with this is that subdomains are treated by google as a separate domain, so any google juice flowing to your blog does not help your main domain. With SEO, one of the most important things is incoming links and if you split your incoming links across multiple domains, the sum is actually less than the whole. The best solution is to host your blog in a subfolder on your main domain (e.g. example.com/blog).

chlee 15y ago
Are there blog hosting services that one can use in a subfolder? AFAIK, both tumblr and posterous only supports subdomains but not folders.
- zizee 15y ago
  Unfortunately not. I don't think this is actually possible as I don't think you can have a subfolder of a site hosted elsewhere (not in a 'performant' manner at least). The only solution that I know of is to host it all on the one box which makes it trick if you want to use Heroku to host your app. I am currently wrestling with this problem as I want to host a new app on Heroku, but have the marketing side of the site powered by wordpress to take advantage of things like third party themes. The app will also generate linkable content, so it is important to me to have it on the same domain, but there seems to be no way to achieve what I want to do with heroku :-( So annoying!
  - SingAlong 15y ago
    Did you try the Cedar stack?
    - zizee 15y ago
      Well, you can host PHP on a cedar stack, and I have successfully deployed wordpress to heroku, so that is very cool. It was actually really easy with this: https://github.com/mhoofman/wordpress-heroku https://github.com/mhoofman/wordpress-heroku But unfortuently, to the best of my knowledge, you can't host both PHP at the same time as Rails. If anyone know otherwise I would love to hear!

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

joshu 15y ago
Which you run. Please disclose. http://blog.trillsy.com/@kerryusry http://blog.trillsy.com/@kerryusry
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- kerryusry 15y ago
  Another option that is out there in beta now is http://trillsy.com http://trillsy.com. You can use existing themes or your own design, it offers more user features, multiple contributors or posting from the public and also has an post type for events with an event calendar. It is worth checking out, beta keys are going out. In the interest of full disclosure this is my service, sorry about missing that when first posting.
  - getsat 15y ago
    Free trial... wait, I need a beta key? Where are the plans/prices?
    - kerryusry 15y ago
      The free trial will always be there, the beta key is a temporary requirement, a gate if you will, and extends the trial period. Plans are not entirely set, the entry plan will be low but it is not a free service, it is aimed at business primarily not a personal blog.

mvkel 15y ago

I'll take 99.8% uptime over managing an entire blog infrastructure.

trickjarrett 15y ago
Out of genuine curiosity, what percent of uptime would be worth managing your own infrastructure?
- tobtoh 15y ago
  I don't think it's quite a simply answer like X% uptime. A lot of the decision is the 'quality' of the downtime. For example: * Is it generally stable, but only going down in peak load situations (obviously no good if you know peak load occurs when you are doing critical new product release/sales etc, but may be okay if you peak load corresponds to non-critical events). * How long is the outages? If it goes down for 1 minute each day, that may be more acceptable compared to '100%' uptime except one day when it goes out for 365 minutes. All of that affects the impact that the downtime has on your venture - it's quite possible you might have 'poor' uptime stats, but it has zero effect on your business, in which case the cost/effort savings from using a 'poorer uptime' hosted service may be worth it.
  - mvkel 15y ago
    Well put. I echo your sentiments entirely. No point in bending over backwards for 99.999% uptime when it has zero effect on one's business. Priorities...
- mvkel 15y ago
  I think it's more important to know _when_ the downtime occurs vs. the percentage itself. If the site is down from 12am to 6am due to some botched maintenance, I really don't care, as traffic will be minuscule, if not non-existent for our core market. And 6 hours of downtime is a killer for uptime percentage. The "Jekyll is so easy! It's the easiest thing I've ever maintained!" argument reminds me of Andy Rubin's now infamous quote about the openness of Android: "the definition of open: "mkdir android ; cd android ; repo init -u it://android.git.kernel.org/platform/manifest.git ; repo sync ; make" The point of Tumblr is I don't need to maintain _anything_!

alexwolfe 15y ago

A Tumblr blog may not be the best solution but spending that many resources on a blog (especially one not featured in the main navigation) is usually out of the question for most startups. For most startups the amount of time invested for a custom Jekyll setup and a downtime script could be replaced with a new feature or a better product/home page. I think its important for startups not to spend too much time blogging unless they feel it will provide them some decent traffic and strongly support the product/company. Make the product better first. If your blog host (Tumblr) isn't stable enough, wordpress it and be done with it.

apsurd 15y ago
HN'ers have a hard enough time accepting: 'more features' != 'more marketshare' I would caution this making sure to note "it depends on the startup". If your industry pays attention to blogs it's very much worth devoting large amounts of effort to capturing this attention. I as much as the next programmer need the _focus on marketing_ mantra pounded into my head time and time again. See 37signals blog, seomoz blog, and every piece of advice patio11 has ever written.
- alexwolfe 15y ago
  I certainly don't have a hard time with that. Perhaps reread the comment I left. "unless they feel it will provide them some decent traffic and strongly support the product/company" Not sure you added anything to my previous comment.
SoftwareMaven 15y ago
I spent 1/2 a day building a blog (including RSS support). I wanted an integrated visual experience that stayed up to date as the website changed (which it is doing a lot right now) and took advantage of the same underlying db and hosting infrastructure. Trying to do that with a different blog engine would have meant tweaking the blog every day, which would be far more effort.
- moonlighter 15y ago

paul9290 15y ago

I'm in the amidst of launching my start-up CodePupil.com . What I dig about Tumblr is how fast Google indexes posts from there due to it's popularity. Thus, if your looking to HELP get your start-up's name listed in Google fairly quikcly, then a Tumblr or Posterous would be best to use. I posted a Tumblr "About us," yesterday and Google indexed it eight hours later.

Legion 15y ago

So, in the last week or so of reading Hacker News, I've been told: * Don't blog on Google+ * Don't blog on Tumblr Before I start blogging, are there any others I should know about?

ohashi 15y ago
I think ultimately you will see complaints against almost every service and you will be left with one choice. Host your own. And then that has its own shortcomings. So we can conclude that everything has risks no matter what. It's up to you to assess and decide which risks you can tolerate.
cosmez 15y ago
how about ignoring everyone and just start to blog? it doesn't matter how you do it right now, just do it and worry about that later.
resnamen 15y ago
DIY blogging software made from scratch, in 12 hours, with node.JS and Mongo. Anything else would be too mainstream for HN.

huhtenberg 15y ago

Strangely enough I find that I am more inclined to read company's blog if it is visibly hosted on a dedicated blog site, Tumblr and Posterious included. Based on this observation I did a bit of testing of <product>.tumblr.com vs blog.<product>.com and former generated more foot traffic from Twitter link drops. Haven't tried www.<product>.com/blog though, it might well outperform both options.

abalone 15y ago

Ummm.... they're hosting on HEROKU? In 2011, Tumblr was down for 42 hours. In 2011, Heroku was down for 76 hours in one incident alone. And that's all before you get to the hubris of the assumption that your custom coded setup will perform better. A more sensible argument would be to move to a host with a better proven uptime record, such as Blogger (nearly 100%). Sources: http://allthingsd.com/20111215/tumblr-had-42-hours-of-downtime-in-2011-and-thats-an-improvement/ http://allthingsd.com/20111215/tumblr-had-42-hours-of-downti... https://status.heroku.com/incident/151 https://status.heroku.com/incident/151

PStamatiou 15y ago
No biggie, I can temporary move our blog to another host with a simple DNS change and pulling the static site from our repo. Ah, the power of jekyll!
- theli0nheart 15y ago
  If you're using Jekyll, why not just host with S3/Cloudfront?
  - PStamatiou 15y ago
    I had thought about it but - I wanted to use Sinatra to 301 old tumblr urls - Call me weird but I loathe seeing *.html in urls and that's the only thing you can do with S3 root object (when I checked a few months ago) - something I can't remember. maybe it was cf edge server time to update when altering updates.
    - k7d 15y ago
      > I loathe seeing *.html in urls and that's the only thing you can do with S3 root object You can configure name of index file, and that will be displayed for requests against root URL and subdirectories (such as blog posts) as well. No need for having .html in URLs. The only problem I've encountered with S3 web hosting is that it does not let you host naked domains.

liefe 15y ago

So what is a generally accepted blog back-end if you're self hosting?

akuchlous 15y ago

has anybody tried to crawl tumblr outside of goog?

bountie 15y ago

The problem with Tumblr as a blog is that it's not easy to do straightforward comments

shortformblog 15y ago

I run a news site on Tumblr and I can tell you my downtime problems are nowhere near as bad as this site suggests they are. In the past three months I can remember only one major bout of downtime, and I'm on the site most of the day every day. And in the case that downtime is as bad as it seems, I suggest you guys use CloudFlare, which will at least keep a cached version of your site online even during downtime issues. Tumblr is way more about community than mission-critical uptime. If you treat it like mission-critical uptime, you're going to be disappointed. If you're trying to reach an audience for your application — which, honestly, should be more important with a staff blog — Tumblr is a great bet.

danberger 15y ago

Another reason to not user Tumblr is David Karp's [the founder's] attitude. http://getoffmyinternets.net/2011/05/31/david-karp-will-tell-you-how-to-run-a-company/ http://getoffmyinternets.net/2011/05/31/david-karp-will-tell...

kjackson 15y ago

Is your price really 50 cents per print plus shipping? Costco.com will print for 12 cents per print and free shipping, are you guys going to be able to be competitive against them?

PStamatiou 15y ago
Picplum is focusing on quality rather than optimizing on price. Our prints are considerably higher quality with premium archival lustre paper (much thicker), better packaging-- We're selling an experience not cheap prints with an ecommerce add-to-cart-then-select-sizes experience. Happy to report that price has not been an issue and we have many happy return customers. Try it out and let us know what you think! Each new account has $5 in credits.

Sukotto 15y ago

Heroku-hosted custom Jekyll setup I thought Heroku only allowed dynamically-generated content (with static assets hosted elsewhere) But the whole point of Jekyll is that it generates a static site. What am I missing? (seriously) I thought a starter Heroku account might work well for a side project I have cooking... Coincidentally, I was reading about Jekyll as something fun to try. Combining both of them would be pretty cool.

philwelch 15y ago
Heroku doesn't actively prevent you from hosting a static site. Yeah, heavy assets like images and video should be hosted elsewhere, but with HTML and stuff it's fine to just throw it in a static Git repo and use Heroku.
- zizee 15y ago
  The main thing that will stop you is the limit on the "slug size", which is 100mb. This is heaps for static text like html, but if your blog is image intensive you could hit the wall after a while. Video would push you over super quick.

leftnode 15y ago

It does depress me somewhat when I see people writing incredibly insightful or great blog posts on another company's blogging platform. I'd live in constant worry the company could fold up shop one day and your posts would be gone (unless you kept local copies manually). It's your writing, if it is good and insightful, write it on a server you have control over.

CJefferson 15y ago
I used to have a blog on my personal domain (not saying it was incredibly insightful), and I got tired of updating wordpress. One day the wordpress update failed, and I just took down the blog and now it is gone. My livejournal blog however, which I set up over 10 years ago (and haven't updated in 7 years) is still there in it's embarassing completeness.

resnamen 15y ago

Somewhat related gripe: does anybody like the admin UI in Tumblr? It seems like important settings are scattered all over the place. I don't understand why the site view and admin views are two discrete locations, either. Has the core service received much love since David Karp's first cut?