Daniel Pietzsch

We have been lucky. We weren’t in Christchurch when the 6.3 earthquake hit just before 1pm on Tuesday, Feb. 22nd 2011. We were hiking through the mountains near Glenorchy/Queenstown (approx. 400km away to the south-west).
A hut warden was present on this track and he told us on Wednesday morning what has happened. He also offered us to make one call via radio (there’s no cell-phone coverage in NZ’s mountains). The connection was short, but we managed to reach our neighbours to ask if they are ok and if their and our houses are still standing.
Everything was ok, and so we went ahead with the normal plan and continued walking for the next couple of days.

Only after we came back on Saturday, we realized the degree of destruction this earthquake caused. It was terrible to see all the pictures.

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):

1. to use my own domain name,
2. a clean and simple, fully or mostly customizable theme,
3. an easy to use interface,
4. not to pay much,
5. Markdown syntax for writing and styling articles,
6. search,
7. basic navigation functionality such as ‘Archives’ and ‘Tags’, and a display of most recent/popular posts,
8. an ‘About’ page (and the possibility to publish more static content in general),
9. statistics of pageviews,
10. integration with Feedburner,
11. comments and
12. 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:

1. Wordpress.com,
2. Typepad and
3. Blogger.

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 all the others?
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!

<sub>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.</sub>