A few thoughts on Tumblr, on Tumblr

Though I’ve been running a Wordpress-powered blog for more years than I’d care to recount - I’m beginning to be pulled towards replacing Wordpress with Tumblr.

I thought I’d take a moment to “think out loud” and jot down a few reasons why I’m coming to that conclusion and also put some things down that would push me over the edge.

For the last three months I’ve been curating The Watercolor Gallery using Tumblr and, over that period of time, I’ve fallen in love with how simple it is to put together new features and queue them up for publication throughout the week. I’ve also felt part of the community here on Tumblr since the very first day - which is nice.

The ease of posting to The Watercolor Gallery alone isn’t enough for me to take years of posts/comments, pageviews, and hard work over to Tumblr from my blog. There are a few things that I would need to find or build myself to be able to make the switch.

Importing a Wordpress blog into Tumblr doesn’t seem to be possible. I could build something using the API, I suppose, but it would be nice if the Tumblr team made it easier to come from Wordpress or Blogspot or Livejournal, etc. 

Comments are dead. I think. The trends of today seem to be Liking, Reblogging, Twitter, or Liking on Facebook. However, my site has tens of thousands of extremely valuable comments. Those would need to make it over into my Tumblog. New posts wouldn’t be required to have the ability to comment but the older posts should, at the very least, display the comments that have been there for years.

More and more I’m leaning towards moving to Tumblr without any data whatsoever. It would be sort of like moving out of the country. If you move from one city to another you would more than likely take your couch, some clothes, and that brand-new HD TV that you have. If you moved from Pennsylvania to London you’d probably opt to sell everything on Craigslist and buy new in the UK. I’m beginning to conclude that I’d have to leave cdevroe.com intact and simply create a sub-domain (such as blog.cdevroe.com) or a directory (such as cdevroe.com/blog) to host the new Tumblr-powered portion of my site and simply begin anew. 

There are other things, however, that would make moving to Tumblr for my main blog much easier. Many of which come from years and years of using Wordpress. I’ve been trained in the Wordpress arts for so long that switching karate styles midlife isn’t easy. I’d have to unlearn what I have learned (thanks Master Yoda) and try to learn new ways of doing things.

An example of this would be in-post images. Tumblr is really great for posting photos to if you are using the “Photo” post feature. But, what about photos within a Text Post such as this one? For some reason - unless I’m missing it - Tumblr does not have a way to upload a photo for use within a post. It requires you to put in a URL of a photo. For the Artist Interviews series on The Watercolor Gallery I’ve used Skitch as my image host of choice. So I have to put an image into Skitch (which is a fantastic application by the way), upload it to their Web service, grab the URL, and paste it here for Tumblr. I don’t know why. Why is it so easy to make Photo posts and yet so difficult to put photos into Text posts?

Then comes the options for those photos. Tumblr provides a few; Baseline, Top, Middle, Bottom, Text Top, Text Bottom, Left and Right. No center? I don’t know why - and again, I could easily be missing these features - but I can’t center an image in my post without resorting to manually editing the HTML. Even then it is tough based on the various style rules within the themes here on Tumblr.

That is just one example of how I’d need to unlearn the way that Wordpress handles post publication (which is vastly superior yet also much more complex than Tumblr) and learn the way that Tumblr works.

A nice feature to have to would be titles on Photo posts. One of the main sources of traffic for my blog is Google. The Watercolor Gallery, so far, gets very little traffic from search engines because most of the posts there are Photo posts and, by their very nature, aren’t structured in such a way that Google will index them very well. This is something that is clearly a choice taken by the Tumblr team and one that they have every right to make. I just wish I would get the same “Google juice” using Tumblr as I do with Wordpress. But I know I won’t.

Video embeds, being that I work for an online video company, are also kind of tough. Tumblr tries to make it easier than any other service to embed a video. However, by making it that easy they actually make it more difficult to get the result you may want. Sure, it is easy to have a default embed but what if I want to customize the embed code? The moment I try to Tumblr strips out all of the HTML that I put in (without any warning) and saves whatever it thinks is safe. As a geek and builder of such things I understand the reasoning but - it stinks.

But this is all about publishing - which are the most important features of Tumblr for me - but what about reading and being part of the community? I’ve got a wishlist for these also.

Being able to subscribe, via RSS, to all of the sites I follow on Tumblr would be an excellent feature. I believe Tumblr would rather us all use their Dashboard to read but I prefer Google Reader and Reeder for iPad. The Dashboard is nice and all but it isn’t nearly as nice as using Reader or Reeder.

I manage multiple sites using Tumblr. It would be really nice to be able to follow a site on Tumblr as any of the accounts that I manage. As an example, if I wanted The Watercolor Gallery to follow Vinita Pappas on Tumblr rather than my cdevroe account here - because that simply makes more sense - it would be nice if I could. Maybe there is a way to do that - but I haven’t found out how.

No software is ever perfect for everyone that uses it. I don’t expect Tumblr to ever fill every need that I have nor do I expect it to ever become as complex and robust as Wordpress has. In fact, that is part of its allure. I suppose this rant is simply a way for me to vent off the frustration of someone that is trying to change. Trying to deal with what is new and strip off what is old. It isn’t easy. Years of practice and engrained methods of doing something don’t go away easy. Old habits, as they say, are very hard to break.

I’m still not sure whether or not I will take the plunge and begin using Tumblr for my main blog but I do know that it has been an excellent service for curating The Watercolor Gallery - and for that I’m very happy.