I've been fairly happy blogging with Tumblr for a while now. It's been nice having a platform that allows me to just, you know, blog without worrying too much about the details. I particularly like that it can handle anything I throw at it without much difficulty, whether that be text, photos, or audio. Nice. Lately, though, it's started to feel kind of fragmented. Tumblr was never designed for regular blogging, and some of its deficiencies are starting to show.
Comments, for example, aren't supported natively in Tumblr, but they make it easy to add Disqus commenting. All well and good, but it feels like the add-on that it is. Then there are the themes, none of which I am overly excited about. My recent re-theming improved some things (to my eye, anyway) but also left me feeling somewhat dissatisfied with others. I could put on my hip boots and wade into the HTML to tinker with it, but frankly I'm not that interested anymore in hand-coding something just to tweak it. Been there, done that.
Then I remembered I had a Posterous account not doing much.Andy Ihnatko wrote a nice review of the service a couple months back, and is continuing to use it as a conduit to his main blog. Others I respect, like Jason Calacanis and Leo Laporte, are also making use of it. If it's good enough for tech luminaries like them, it ought to be good enough for me, so I thought I'd give it a serious go.
As of now, I've disabled all my various forwarding services like Ping.fm and Twitterfeed, and I've turned off most of the feeds being imported into my Friendfeed (a service that appears to be dying anyway). I took the code out of my main blog that activates the Disqus commenting, and the comments link in posts on larryanderson.org will now take readers to the equivalent post on my Posterous blog. I'm thinking that if I like how everything works, I may move the larryanderson.org domain over to Posterous and use it as my main blog. (Edit: Well, *that didn't take long…)*
I like that I can create a new post simply by emailing (this post is being written in Gmail), and that it also will serve as a conduit to whatever other services I specify, thus unifying my web presence more than has been the case. There's a small fly in the ointment as regards emailing photos from my phone (thanks for nothing, Verizon) but I'm awaiting an email from the Posterous support guys saying they've authorized my phone's email address, which will remove the only real problem I have with the service right now.(Edit: Fixed, while I was writing this post, by one of the Posterous founders. On a Sunday night, yet. Wow.) So anyway, that's what's going on with the blog. Let me know what you think.