I’ve long been meaning to write about Tumblr, the popular porn blogging platform. And then someone on good old Facebook asked about choosing an engine for a blog, so I made up my mind.
So, what I like about Tumblr:
Infinite scrolling. Some themes have no pagination: new posts load with AJAX as you scroll. I think this is the future of websites. One online store has done this in its product catalog, and I think it’s cool.
The community. Like early LiveJournal, and then early Twitter, Tumblr right now is a very concentrated, fairly uniform community of creative people. You can dig up lots of wonderful stuff there. True, the other 90% of the blogs there are pure porn. And I think that’s great too :) The thing is, it’s a handy place to dump pictures and bits and pieces from the internet that you like, and, well, whatever else you like…
Under community I’d also put the amazingly easy way of reposting content from other blogs on the same platform. What’s usually called “dragging it over to your place” takes a few clicks here and is called a reblog.
Scheduled posting. A damn handy way to schedule posts with the “queue”: posts are easy to queue up, and they get published at a set interval (though the queue has been seen to hiccup). Or you can use “publish on” and set a specific publishing time (haven’t tested it).
Beautiful themes, built for posting pictures, and a superb slideshow. Here, for example, are 40 free Tumblr themes.
To see it in action, take a look at the blog of stylist Vladislav Nagurny, which I helped set up. It has exactly those slideshows and the endless page loading.
Built-in support for the Disqus comment system.
Then, for the sake of order, I should dilute these honeyed odes to the platform a little. What I don’t like about Tumblr: it’s down a lot :(
P.S. I think I should also warn you that Tumblr has a special social-network magnetism, thanks to the endlessly refreshing feed of your friends’ posts. Beware!
UPD. Yes, it also has publishing by email. Even with formatting. Haven’t tested it.