why i like tumblr: i hate tumblr
I’ve had quite the time with the blog transition.
I suppose it started with being completely exasperated by The Write-On. I had become a slave to the format - conscripted into long prose and narration. I was always baffled by the chilly response I received from my shorter posts: the quick snippets and memes and other what-have-you that I posted whenever I was, as The Dude would say, “into the whole brevity thing”.
And it finally dawned on me. Prose and narration are the centerpiece of my blog. Even the title attests to this. As does the very format - sparse and open white spaces. The shorter posts hung in the oblivion like corpses amongst the dunes - warning passers-by of the perils of blog lazines.
Blogs succeed when they reflect the writer and the writer’s lifestyle. When life and lifestyle change, the blog must change with it. Many of my cohorts have fallen away over the years, deciding that they had “changed” or “grown-up” too much for blogging. The soltuion isn’t to stop blogging. It’s to change and grow-up the format to complement your very existence.
Tumblr seemed more conducive to this. Seemed. It has the appearance of flexibility - easy templates for posting text, video, quotes, images - each with slight format variegations to keep the look fresh. But behind this sheen of flexibility lies a rigid dogma:
“This is a Tumblog. It is not a blog. It is truly and deeply different. If you want a blog, go somewhere else.”
In accordance with this dogma, the powers-that-be of Tumblr have disabled - or simply failed to include - basic weblog functionality. Comments, HTML editing (they have it - it’s just broke-az), sufficient image hosting, basic formating controls (like center tags), etc.
Should you be heretical enough to have signed up for a “Tumblog” (yeah, I know - it even has the word “blog” in it) and actually want any of these things - or ya know, want them to work, then you are per se in derelection of the Tumblr dogma and you can just go somewhere else. Because you don’t believe.
The dogma also expressly defies the long prosaic post. You can see how much I care about that…
So there you have it. I’m on Tumblr because I like being difficult. And also because I put several hours into customizing my theme and got it just how I likes it before I actually started posting and realized the whole thing is ridiculous. And I’m too lazy to do it all over again in Typepad, Wordpress, etc.
Now to bring back the Haloscan. Because the Tumblr elite will just love that…
