Blogging Tools

I have been making some changes in the blogging tools I use, so I thought I would spell out what I am using and why.

Typepad

I am still involved in long form, slow twitch blogging, like this post. I had thought that I would be migrating all my blogging to Tumblr, because of their once-innovative social sharing model. However, Typepad has recently unveiled a new version of their blogging platform which is a different take on new forms of blog sociality(see Typepad 2.0: Ready For The Next Phase), so I have decided to stay with Typepad for the forseeable future.

Tumblr

Note that I say ‘once-innovative’ regarding Tumblr’s platform, because what once made it a standout is becoming the standard model for social sharing tools. Users of these social tools can follow one another via the open sharing or asymmetric sharing model, made commonplace by Twitter and other. Tumblr is — in particular — a cool place for imagery, but the other sorts of posts are managed in a so-so fashion, and it is a terrible solution for text-based blogging.

Here’s an example. Using Tumblr to write about a NY Times story is incredibly painful. Although the tool provides a bookmarklet, it just doesn’t work right. Lets say I select three paragraphs in a news article. I click the bookmarklet, and the result is a pending quote — one of the post types in Tumblr — where the text I selected is treated as a qoute, in one editable field, and the link is another editable field. First problem, the paragraph breaks are deleted. And if I change the post type to a text post the link is lost. Knowing these snags will happen, I have learned to copy the text I want to include in my post, and then after using the bookmarklet, I pasts the paragraphs into the editable field under the link. I then selct that entire field, and copy it. Then I change the post type to text, and paste my link plus text over the text Tumble has created, which lacks paragraph marks. Then I save it, and go edit it at Tumblr.

You might say, “Yikes! Why use the bookmarklet at all?” The reason is that this is the only place that Tumblr allows you to change the type of a post, and it is the quickest way to do it, despite all the steps, now that I am adept at it.

But the other headaches mount: If I use anything but the most basic HTML, Tumblr looses the abiility to treat blank lines as paragraph markers. So If I use a blockquote, I will also have to use HTNL paragraph breaks throughout.

I have developed workarounds, but such gyrations are a pain in the ass. Repeated complaints to support have not led to any results, so I am contemplating a move away from Tumblr, bit by bit.

First thing I will drop will be link posting, which I have been doing at Tumblr for months. I was sort of using Tumblr to post my photo stream, but I am dropping that for Mobypicture (see below). And of course, I have discoved that there is no way to export anything from Tumblr. It turns out that Mars Edit interfaces with Tumblr, so there is a way to export posts, and repost them elsewhere, although it is a bit laborious.

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