The process of choosing my blogging software was quite a long one. I read articles on blogging software and did a lot of testing, before I decided for one candidate.
In the end it came down to whether self-hosting my own installation of Wordpress or using Tumblr, which I don’t have to host myself.
As you can see, I decided to go with Tumblr.
Here is the whole story.
My requirements
I had some preferences to what the software should be capable of. Here are these preferences somewhat sorted by priority.
I wanted (as far as possible):
to use my own domain name,
a clean and simple, fully or mostly customizable theme,
an XMLRPC interface for blogging directly from Textmate.
Eliminating alternatives
I really would prefer not to host the software myself - despite the fact, that I already pay for a shared hosting package where the blogging software would easily fit onto and it is no problem for me to 'handle’ the technical stuff of setting everything up.
I have this preference simply because I don’t want to deal with maintaining and scaling the software/server.
So I looked at the most popular hosted blogging services first, starting with the one I’m most familiar with:
I quickly realised that none of them was for me. Wordpress and Typepad charge me for things that are high on my requirements list (f.e. custom CSS or using your own domain) and Blogger just didn’t feel right1; and I couldn’t find out quickly if Blogger offers custom CSS at all.
So I thought 'why not go with hosting the software myself’?
I already pay for the webspace anyway and this way I could do whatever I want.
I chose Wordpress for this, because that’s the platform I’m most familiar with and made good experiences with in the past. I also looked at Movable Type, but that appeared to be even more bloated than Wordpress, so I didn’t consider it seriously2.
Hey, but what’s with Tumblr?
At this stage I didn’t even consider Tumblr. Maybe because it was not on my mind and maybe because I thought this is more for so-called tumblelogs. Looking back, I don’t know why I didn’t consider it right from the beginning.
Hey, what’s with alltheothers?
There’s lots of blogging software/services out there and I can’t try all of them. I had a look at some of them, but when they didn’t appeal to me or I didn’t know much about them, I didn’t bother trying them out.
Setting it all up
First, I installed Wordpress on my webspace, downloaded a nice theme and configured everything to my liking. I was very impressed by Wordpress 2.8 and how easy it is with this version to browse for and install plugins and themes directly from the admin interface. Wordpress makes it very easy to set everything up and to customize your blog.
Then, I became interested in Tumblr again3. I had a closer look at what they have to offer and discovered, that they offer a lot of what I care about without charging extra. So I signed up.
After setting up both Wordpress and Tumblr, a long period of testing began and I out-weighted the pros and cons of both systems.
Which one would better suit my requirements?
Less is more
As a matter of fact, Wordpress would better suit my requirements!
And at that point, I thought that this is the only way to go for me: I am in full control - all the time.
There is nothing I could do with Tumblr that I couldn’t do with Wordpress. In fact, I could do more with Wordpress!
In my opinion, this is the biggest advantage of a self-hosted Wordpress installation over Tumblr; but this is also the biggest disadvantage.
Right from the moment I signed up, I was impressed by Tumblr’s user interface (UI) and its user experience in general: the guidance through the registration process, the clarity of the whole admin interface, the clear focus on publishing content easily.
The more I tested it, the more I liked it.
And as an addition to the spot-on UI, customization of your blog is dead-easy. For some customizations of your theme - like colours or custom CSS - you often don’t have to get into the code of the theme. But even this is simple and a lot easier than with Wordpress.
Tumblr gives you just enough possibilities to customize your blog. This way, you can stay focused on publishing important articles like this one and don’t end up tuning your theme/plugins/widgets all the time.
I had some serious doubts about choosing Tumblr over Wordpress along the way: navigation is not that easy and customizable as in Wordpress, no static pages, no picture uploads for text posts and the general fear of not being in full control.
But Tumblr’s ease of use and its slim interface easily makes up for those disadvantages.
Tumblr has a lot I want and I am confident that the developers will come up with even more great stuff in the future4 while still keeping it simple.
If you want a blog, give Tumblr a try. It’s great!
1. I need to eliminate alternatives quickly in an early stage. That’s highly subjective, unscientific and you might think differently about Blogger.
2. I used Movable Type in the past, too; and also liked it. But more from a blogger/writer perspective. I never set up and administered a Movable Type blog.
3. I don’t know exactly why, but probably because I like the blog of the guy who created it and/or I liked their signup screen very much.
4. And they do: they recently enabled picture uploads in text posts. I was very pleased! Even though these pictures are scaled down without offering a full-size version, it’s still very nice to have.
I find the recent discussion about Google’s Chrome OS and other operating systems/netbook solutions like Litl or HyperSpace very interesting.
The idea to use a computer as a thin client ‘just’ to access the web is really great. All your data is stored on the internet and all you use are web applications to accomplish your tasks.
I think there is a huge potential for these type of OSes although it’s not (yet) suitable for everyone.
Who will use it?
I believe there are millions of users out there that have a personal computer and only use it for doing stuff on the internet. And even if they do something else, using a classic desktop application - like writing the occasional letter in MS Word f.e. - there is already a web application for this.
These users don’t need an expensive, full-featured computer with lots of storage and processing power to accomplish their tasks.
The huge advantage that web applications have, is that users don’t have to install anything. It’s easy, works everywhere and you don’t have to worry about the hardware. You also don’t have to deal with anything malicious like viruses or malware, either. It just works! And that is what these users want and need.
With Offline Web Applications coming with the HTML5 specification, this doesn’t even make the computer useless when you don’t have an internet connection available all the time. Of course, you won’t be able to chat with your friends while offline, but you still can write that e-mail you would like to send later or improve and finish the document you’re currently working on.
As shown in the demo of Chrome OS, you even can work with images from your digital camera and store them on the internet using an appropriate service. I believe a lot of users don’t process their images anyway and also share them anyway. So why store it on your local machine?
Even if they did process some of their images, they may also be satisfied with a less powerful online image editor like f.e. Picnik.
When selling these netbooks and their OSes, there might be a challenge of convincing these users to store everything on the web. But I don’t think that this is too hard to do: they already store a lot of data on the web, so why not store everything else there, too?
I think that’s even more secure for them, because I believe a lot of people don’t do regular backups. With every document stored in the cloud, they don’t have to worry about this, because the service provider is probably very serious about backups and availability unless he wants to ruin his business easily.
Netbooks and OSes like Chrome are cheap, easy to use and maintenance-free. That is perfect for people who use a computer to access the internet.
Who will not use it?
These OSes and netbooks are not made for people that need lots of storage capacity, processing power and/or desktop apps that make use of this.
To only name a few of these tasks, you are not able to manage and listen to your music library, process and sort photos professionally, or f.e. make a music or video production on a netbook. Software development is also not easily possible on a netbook. At least not yet.
The future
I am really curious what the future will bring up. When an internet connection will be available everywhere, be lightning-fast, reliable and affordable and there are also affordable services for storing all of your gigabytes of data in the cloud, we all might only be using netbooks exclusively one day.
You will pay for your software on a monthly subscription basis and your data is available everywhere you go, no matter what device you use to access the internet.
But all this is really far away, I guess.
Right now, I think thin clients in form of netbooks, running a slim, secure OS like Chrome, Litl or HyperSpace are a great alternative for users that spend 100% of their time on the internet when they use a computer, and for users as a secondary machine when they don’t need the power and versatility of a full-featured laptop or desktop computer.
Saving files, copying them, syncing them—this is all pointless clerical work that I want my computer to do for me. ChromeOS officially nukes the “file” as a core user-facing OS abstraction. This is a huge victory for users everywhere[…]
Last weekend, I tried out an iPod touch for the first time - and had one of those (rare) moments when software makes me smile…
One of the things I wanted try was the software keyboard. So I went to Twitter and produced a short tweet.
While typing, I quickly noticed that there’s no dot (.) amongst the visible keys. “Well”, I thought, “they wouldn’t have just forgotten such an important sign!” And: “The most straight forward thing would be to hit ’Space’ twice for a dot…”
And Boom! There was a dot. Great! :-)
Check out the new Extras page. I bet there’s at least one feature on there that you didn’t know about.
That’s great. I didn’t know about this:
Google Reader
Send items directly from Google Reader simply by clicking the Instapaper Read Later >bookmarklet with an item selected.
I always used the ‘Send to’ option, which requires more clicks.
And I also wasn’t aware of the the Readability-like functionality.
Instapaper Text bookmarklet
Install this bookmarklet to instantly view any compatible web page in Instapaper’s >Text view, right in your browser.
If you are not using Instapaper, I can just encourage you to try it out. It makes reading on the web a joy. You can save pages to read later and can also read these articles without the clutter of ads and other distracting things. It also presents them in a serif font at an easy to read size.
It’s one of my favorite and most-used apps!
The brilliant Paul Irish built a CSS3 rule generating web app that he calls, “CSS3, Please!” Using automated vendor specific code, you can make box-shadow, gradient, rgba, even rotate, work in IE, Mozilla and WebKit.
When Internet Explorer 6 was launched in 2001, it offered cutting–edge security – for the time. Since then, the Internet has evolved and the security features of Internet Explorer 6 have become outdated.
I had some problems installing the heroku gem on Leopard:
$ sudo gem install heroku
Building native extensions. This could take a while...
ERROR: Error installing heroku:
heroku requires json_pure (>= 1.2.0, < 1.5.0, runtime)
So I tried to install the json_pure gem first (sudo gem install json_pure), but this always seemed to install/update the json gem instead of the json_pure gem.
I eventually managed to install the correct gem by providing the version number on installation:
sudo gem install json_pure -v 1.2.4
This installed the json_pure gem and I was also able to install the Heroku gem afterwards.
This nice little Ruby library/gem/plugin is a great helper when you need to execute long running tasks from the terminal.
As the name suggests, it displays the progress of the task and even gives you an ETA for when it thinks it will be done.
Check their examples:
Prior to last week, the limit was improperly calculated: articles in folders weren’t being counted. I fixed the bug so that up to 250 articles were downloaded from the Read Later folder, and the other folders were downloaded in order, as long as there were any slots left, until it hit 250.
And then I got a deluge of email.
My email was one of them.
Great to see an explanation for this.
