I have spent the last week trying to see if Tumblr could replace my Wordpress blog. This experiment has taught me some interesting things:
- The community on Tumblr is amazing.
- Tumblr is primarily geared towards sharing shorter thoughts and ideas. Want to throw a picture online. Easy. Share a video. No problem. Compose a more complex post with multiple images and videos. Much harder. Wordpress beats Tumblr hands down for longer posts.
- I love the Tumblr dashboard. So much great material scrolls by (assuming you are following the right people).
- Many Tumblr sites simply reblog others posts with out adding much original content. This is OK. Tumblr is designed to reblog and share material. Some Tumblblogs remind me of Myspace–endless pages of flashing gifs of talking heads.
- Despite optimizing some things, Tumblr sucks at SEO compared to Wordpress (unless you put in a lot of work).
Point #2 is what is giving me problems. It is too hard to create more complex posts compared to the Wordpress workflow I have established. There are also many things that I want to reblog but I don't want them cluttering up my site causing my original content to get lost.
So I have decided to move my "proper" blog back to Wordpress. This is where I will post my thoughts, write articles, and share links to things I find compelling. But I will still cross-post my articles from Wordpress to my Tumblr site1 so my Tumblr followers can conveniently follow what I write from their Dashboards. This also frees me up to reblog things to my hearts content on Tumblr without cluttering up my main site.
I look forward to continuing to develop relationships with my fellow Tumblrites.