But it lacks some stuff that WordPress does really well. With Tumblr your posts aren’t the focus — when you log into the Tumblr dashboard it shows you the posts from those you follow. It’s not particularly suited for use as a CMS, which is made clear when you see that it shows your posts as a big list. It’s geared towards publishing, publishing a lot, and seeing what other people are publishing.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. I don’t doubt that it got me blogging regularly, and even often, which is something that I just wasn’t doing before. In fact, I wrote a post about how effective Tumblr was in doing that.

It’s served me very well over the past few months, but how easily things could get “lost” in a mass of posts — particularly ones that you’d spent a long time working on — was really quite disturbing.

WordPress is the opposite, with many options for sorting, categorising, and finding content. This is one of the things that drove me to Tumblr, probably because I didn’t have many posts (and very few of good quality) and WordPress was constantly pointing it out.

While working on my deconstruction of Bullet Magazine’s website the importance of having a clear layout that made it very easy to find and archive content became very apparent. It’s the whole reason why their website is crap, and the whole reason why it needs to change.

And then I published.

I hated what resulted. At over 2,000 words, it was a perhaps unusually long post. Even so, my Tumblr site dealt with it very badly. When reading it you could get half-way down, and have the whole screen occupied by text with no navigation elements either side, except for the scroll bar.¹ Due to the styling, there wasn’t a huge amount of text per-screen either, so the overall effect was very disorientating. I was lost in my own copy.

This specific instance could have been dealt with by a change of theme, but it’s a good cameo for Tumblr’s problems more generally with being “lost in content”.

So I decided to take some of my own medicine, and decided to switch back to WordPress. I’m using the Basic Maths theme, which is nice and clean, with WordPress’s inherent advantage for keeping track of content, along with an awesome custom archives page.

I’m no longer pissing my posts into the abyss, they’re all neatly organised, and the navigation tools on the index pages provide the proper perspective to avoid feeling “lost” again.

That’s the main reason I changed back. I’m also glad to be back using a very flexible, powerful platform. I’ve also got comments enabled again, without having to use Disqus.²

Tumblr isn’t a bad system. It’s really not. It’s fantastic. But it’s just not what I’m looking for for my main site. I’ve still got it set up and I’m still going to post things to it, but “proper” blog posts that have taken time and effort will be published here.

The longer, more detailed answer is that it does everything I need it to do.

Static pages are achieved by linking to a post. Ending posts with question marks allows for comments, though admittedly a limited version of them. One big thing was that it allows for submissions without having an account.

To submit a post to LSJ bloggers, all you need is to fill in your name and email address. No sign up. No account creation. That’s it.

And that’s pretty much it for the entire site. It’s all very simple and straightforward because that’s all it needs to be. At its core, LSJ bloggers is a very simple concept: we get together and decide what to discuss, and then we discuss it. The site is just there do host the discussion, and point people at students’ blogs.

It doesn’t need plugins, or social features, or stats, or categories, or Facebook integration, or ads.

It needs text, links, and an easy way to add them.

Tumblr does that, and it does it extremely well. It’s been about 24 hours since I created the blog on Tumblr and everything is set up, and for most of that time I wasn’t even working on it.

Oh, and it’s free. And all I needed to do to get it working with the domain name was change the A records. And, since it’s a hosted service, there was no need to upload and install anything to a server.

The suggestion: get a Tumblr blog.

This idea kind of came out of having this blog, and also having Twitter. There was stuff that was too long or complicated for Twitter, and I didn’t want to put it here because it didn’t ‘fit’.

So I signed up (again) to Tumblr. It’s a mid-way point between Twitter and your real, got-an-about-page-and-tag-cloud-and-everything blog. You may be completely different in this respect, but there’s lots of stuff I want to post, comment on, link to, etc. My Tumblr-powered blog ((I’m using Tumblr as an example because it’s what I’ve been using. There may be other services out there. Whatever. Tumblr works. It’s quick and easy, and most importantly gets you posting.)) is now where I put that stuff.

And now it’s acting like Twitter does — great ideas are bubbling up that are a good fit for a ‘real’ blog.

“This is really cool/interesting/infuriating/bat-shit-fucking-loco, and I’ve got a lot to say about it. Is this really the thing I should be putting on a lightweight service? I think it deserves a proper post.”

Bang, more ideas.

When you get really comfortable with something, you generally want to keep doing it. I recently sent off a bunch of FoI requests, for the first time in months. The next day all I could think about was sending more off, finding out other interesting things, and what that might lead to.

There’s no reason your blog shouldn’t work in the same way.