Adam Howell dot org

Why I ditched tumblr for WordPress

I liked tumblr the second I saw it. After using it I liked it even more. But after several weeks there were a few things that made me jump ship:

• I’m a web guy — even with a custom domain and surprisingly strong theme control, I can’t feel right about not having complete control over my own site.
• The web’s a lot about comments — even though I don’t use them in every post, I also can’t live without them on every post.
• Blogs are a lot about archives — tumblr doesn’t offer one, and I wanted one.
• tumblr controls my post types — I wanted a “code” post type, a staple for other tumblelogs, but would have to wait for tumblr to release an update to ever have it.
• And lastly, Davidville — the company that runs tumblr — is going to have to eventually either make money off tumblr with ads, etc. or sell it. In many ways, my switching is just a preemptive strike against that happening to my stuff.

So, I borrowed a couple of tumblr’s conventions — the post types, the permalink tag on the left that shows the date (and type of post) — and using WordPress, a heavy dose of category checking to classify my posts and CSS classes to style each different kind of post, quickly got my own tumblr-esque tumblelog up and running.

It’s hacky, but it works for me. And, you know, after working on this I can’t help but think that a WordPress-like, open-source, easy-to-install PHP tumblelog CMS (that doesn’t suck) would be a good thing.

Tags: cms, tumblr, wordpress