Misterdibster

Every once in a while, a shift of fundamental proportions comes along into my life and sends me into a new course. Sometimes it’s nothing more than a decision to not cut my hair, sometimes it’s something more significant like moving out to my own place and sometimes it’s like this one where I sign off on one journal to move on to another.

I’ve been blogging on a self-hosted Wordpress journal for a couple of years now and in it, one can find all sorts of journeys that I’ve taken. Its pages hold notes from my travels, thoughts from a journey after quitting my job, dives into the depths of my head and heart, pseudopoetries and other random musings. In fact, one might even be tempted to say that it possibly contained some of the most important words that I have written about my own life.

However, I feel that I have found a new home in Tumblr and the following is my list of geeky explanations to why I love it.  

Simple

There will always be a need for a place for these words in my head to live in and today, Tumblr seems to be the best place for it. It’s super simple blogging interface takes the fear that I often have when facing a blank screen and its bare-bones option seems to be enough for my writing needs. The fact that it is hosted on the great invisible cloud and managed by many talented people means that I can forgo the anxiety that I get from hosting my own engine. It also means that the days of frustrating searches for plugins is over. Simple is all I need and simple is what Tumblr provides.  

Community

While I largely blog as a reminder to myself, the pleasure of blogging truly comes from the relationships that are forged with the readers. There is a joy when someone leaves a comment, share what I’ve posted or interact with it in some way and here, Tumblr seems to win again with its community of Tumblr-ers who are rabidly reblogging , liking and posting stuff. It makes the old self-hosted blog feel like an island in the middle of the great Internet.

There is also a sense that the Tumblr community is less judgemental than those elsewhere. Perhaps it’s because only geeks, hipsters and emo kids use the platform but no matter the reason, it just ‘feels’ as though I am free to post anything on Tumblr.  

Changing blogging patterns

It is also an obvious fact that the blogging/personal publishing landscape of today is very different from yesteryears. Where once, we lived in a world of trackbacks and rss feeds, we now have feeds of information from our Twitter and FB streams peppered with shared links and RTs. Where we once write and things on our own blog, we now have other places to post different things. What we know of as ‘blogging’ has evolved and to me, Tumblr is that evolved version.

If browsing someone’s blog is about reading what he has to say, browsing someone’s Tumblr is looking at the world through someone else’s eyes via his likes, reblogs and his own musings.  (I’m paraphrasing something that I read somewhere before but I can’t remember the original source.) With my ‘blogging’ now including more photo posts and interesting links that I discover all over the internet, Tumblr seems to be the easiest place where I can collect all the bits and give it a nice home.  

But… It’s not a bed of roses

Despite my gushing of Tumblr, it must be said that moving in with it comes with its own concerns. For a start, I am practically gifting all my content to Tumblr and am now at its mercy. The blog will be subjected to its infamous downtimes (although a lot lesser these days), whatever future upgrades/downgrades that it might do in the future and whatever ways that it might decide to ‘monetize’ itself. Also, as someone who enjoys tweaking codes and themes, Tumblr is definitely a lot less flexible than Wordpress in many ways but despite all of these, I think I’ll take my chances with it.  

So there it is, I’m ‘moving’ / moved and the contents of the old journal will be archived offline. I will be posting some of the old pseudopoetries in this new blog in case you miss them.

That’s that. See you around the Internet awesome people.

Peace,
A