Over the past few weeks I've toyed with the idea of switching this blog over to the tumblr platform. Reasons? Tumblr has some very cool templates and it's a breeze to create a post from an iPhone. Tumblr seems to be more about community, where it's encouraged to "repost" from someone else's blog, this in-turn drives more traffic to your blog (which is great when you're trying to promote your photography). However tumblr has some faults, unless you're a html/xml/css coding whiz, adding standard features that are found in blogger, like comments, are a pain in the ass. Tumblr has only been around since 2007 and the features are still in the infancy stages.
Blogger on the other hand has been around since 1999 and is now owned by google which owns the world. (I've always wondered if blogger has precedence in the google search engine over other blogging platforms?) Since the platform is in the mature stages, customization is endless, however most is built on old html code and the "slickness" just doesn't seem to be any comparison to tumblr blogs.
I took a stab at trying to switch over to tumblr but I ran into some snags. First, only a few tumblr templets give you the option for comments, and I NEED to have a comment feature (cuz I love hearing from you guys). There's a free service called Disqus that allows you to add comment options to tumblr providing you are somewhat familiar with coding and that the template you choose doesn't have jacked up code running throughout. Disqus has the option to take all the current comments that people have left in blogger and transfer them over to the Disqus servers which then can be embedded into tumblr. This sounds good in theory, but is complex in practice.
The next dilemma is I wanted to keep the feature "Linkwithin" which is what you see at the bottom of each of my post. This allows you to discover past blog post that are similar in nature to the current post. Linkwithin is not compatible with tumblr, which is a shame because tumblr has a HORRIBLE archiving structure and it makes finding old post very daunting. The last snag was with tags. For each blog post you can "tag" it with key words like "photography" or "design" which makes finding like post easy. Again, depending on which template you choose in tumblr this can be easy or hard. I have yet to find a tumblr template that includes at bare minimum comments and tags (maybe I'm not looking hard enough?)
So with that I decided to stay with blogger and just take some of the design aspects of tumblr and transfer them over which was a lot easier. But I couldn't just give up on tumblr so I created two blogs on their platform.
- I Got Sidetracked, which is just a bunch of random cool images I find on the web, with little or now text.
- iPhone Photography, Since tumblr is very easy to update with the iPhone, I created a gallery of nothing more then my iPhone pics.
I would love to hear your opinions. Do you have a preference of blogger over tumblr? Have you actually tried both platforms? If you're on tumblr, be sure to post a link so I can follow you :)
