WordPress, tumblr, posterous and back

If you subscribe to this blog, you would have noticed there have not been much activity for past few months. So Hello world! Yours truly is still alive, and a bit older and wiser, thanks to the sine wave of life

Where was /me? Somewhere during July, I got this idea of custom domain, a handcrafted stylesheet. And I got lured by tumblr.

World of tumblr

Tumblr was a snap to set up. Simple user dashboard. Great set of themes. Neat post types that categorize your writing and media.

Tumblr has a great community, I found it more focused on arts, photos and general themes (explore tumblr). Tumblr has totally nailed reblog experience. You’d find photos (usually quotations on relationships going fire across community). My blog was at the other end of spectrum, mostly related to technology and so on.

Spam killed my experience. Spammers would create tumblogs and like your post. That would skew the feedback loop with readers. Not cool.

And then my blog had a downtime (or blocked?) for no reason I could understand. They fixed it. But I wrapped and moved on.

I do maintain another blog of mine on tumblr. It mostly focuses on philosophy, spirituality, and other meta thoughts. It blends into tumblr community, and I am liking it there

On to posterous

I liked it. Markdown support for posts. Post by email was great too. I even started refactoring vim-blogit to support posterous. Customer/Developer support at posterous is awesome.

Posterous nails down collaboration and post-anywhere beautifully. They support embedding gists, tweets, scribd documents, so literally anything can be in your post And now they are focusing on Spaces and group blogs, I haven’t played with it.

On a quick glance, I feel exploring new community content could be better in posterous. Honestly I didn’t get a chance to get involved with posterous community a lot, so take my observation with a pinch of salt.

I couldn’t get a theme that was minimalist, yet customizable. I tried creating my theme. But testing it was a pain. The appearance editor could do better in terms of usability, highlighting errors. Gave up.

The other glitch was web-based editor. It is basic, which is ok; but somehow it skewed up formatting of posts. I spent few hours in some cases editing post, saving and looking at website to check the formatting If you’re into posterous, try embedding your code into Github Gists, documents to Scribd and including them in your blog post.

WordPress finally…

This blog started off when wordpress.com was still in beta. Has been with me through the college years, and much part of my professional life. Time to give it the attention it deserves.

And yeah, got the variety themes. A “Just Write” full screen editor. Formatting works. Imported posts from posterous

At this moment, my only goal is to write and share my experiences; with as much less distraction as possible. Let’s see.

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