Tumblr

Tumblr is a free blogging platform and hosting service that has attracted a growing number of microbloggers, in particular the visually-oriented who use their blogs to showcase photography, paintings, design, and other art. Even more specifically than artists, bloggers who flock to Tumblr tend to also be light on type, unlike, say, recipe bloggers who mix photography with ample instructions and backstories about cooking. Tumblr lets you set up and manage a free blog, which the site will host for you (provided you keep "tumblr" in the URL), all through a web portal.

Tumblr is highly similar to Posterous in that it aims to get new bloggers up and running very quickly—within minutes. Tumblr and Posterous both simplify the process of designing and maintaining a blog for ultra beginners, although I found Posterous to be a little friendlier in the long run. Tumblr and Posterous both cater to entry-level bloggers, while and Google's have more to offer experienced bloggers. However, seasoned bloggers sometimes pick up a Tumblr or Posterous account for variety and set their primary blog to autopost to the secondary one. The secondary site becomes a microblog, where casual readers can pop in too look at the latest pictures and captions without even having to load, much less read, the full text that might appear on the primary site.

Sign Up and Dashboard
When setting up a free blog account on Tumblr, the site walks you through two steps to get started. First, you must enter an email address, password, and desired blog name. Second, you're asked to give your blog a proper title, and upload a headshot for your profile. If you don't have a profile image on hand, Tumblr suggests putting your webcam to use and snapping a new image on the spot. You have no excuses not to upload a picture with Tumblr.

If you're brand-new to blogging, the title could cause a little confusion because Tumblr shows you an example in a small image, and that title looks the same as the headline of an individual blog post. Inexperienced bloggers could use a little explanation here. Tumblr does offer suggestions for beginners, but they come later, instead of at the time when they would be most useful. New account creators can optionally dive into more blog customization, or they can instead move on to the dashboard, where new posts are created.

Domain names are a big consideration for serious bloggers, and Tumblr (as an entry-level platform) dissuades users from using anything other than a tumblr.com URL because it "can be tricky to set up, and is only recommended for advanced users. Really—our staff isn't able to support many of the issues that may crop up when setting up a domain name." You can register your own domain elsewhere, and Tumblr won't charge you anything to use it, but you're responsible for all the legwork and fees associated with registering the domain elsewhere. Posterous offers to handle this for you for $24.99 per year (or $129.90 for 10 years) with 50 email addresses included, and full legal ownership and DNS control given to you. Wordpress.com will also help you register a domain name for about $17 per year. Blogger is slightly more helpful than Tumblr, but it also keeps its hands clean of registration and payment of unique domains, sending you to another provider for those services.

If you customize your blog, you'll see a few options along a top menu bar: Info, Theme, Appearance, Pages, Services, Community, and Advanced. The most fun ones to play with if you're new are Themes and Appearnce, where you can add and adjust free Tumblr themes (skins for "look and feel"). Tumblr's theme selection is ample, with plenty of variation, from dark and moody to airy and spacious to cutting edge to campy.

When you want to create a new post in Tumblr, you start by drafting a headline and body copy. You can also add images that you upload to Tumblr or that are linked from elsewhere on the web. You can also publish a post immediately, or schedule it to appear at a later time and date.

The type of posts supported are: text, quote, link, chat, audio, and video. What three of these types—quote, link, and chat—might be was initially unclear to me. I understand what a quote or link might be doing in the context of a blog post, but I didn't think they should stand on their own as entries. Additionally, "chat" seemed like it would be some kind of interactive way for bloggers and blog readers to have a conversation, when in fact, it's just meant to indicate that the content of your blog post is dialogue. Mark a text-based post as a "chat," and Tumblr will apply fonts when it thinks it has recognized the name of a person who is speaker, for example, a few words at the start of a line followed by a colon.

Tumblr's dashboard can be a confusing place, because it looks like a blog rather than the tools that power a blog. I had a few moments during testing when I said to myself, "This doesn't look right. I thought I changed the theme. Why does it look the same as when I started?" The answer was that I was still looking at the tools, not the live blog. Wordpress.com and Google Blogger both have user interfaces that look like more traditional editors, with more emphasis on utility than graphical elements.

Highlights
One feature in Tumblr that can work wonders is the "mass editor." It lets you view dozens of posts at once in thumbnail views and select multiple posts at once to tag, untag, or change a tag on all of them en masse. I remember when I first started really using tags in Google Blogger—I had to go back through all my existing posts and manually change or add tags. As you learn more about blogging, you sometimes realize that you have to go back to re-do a whole lot of work. Tools like the mass editor make it much easier to get the job done quickly and keep your focus on content instead of blog chores.

In addition to publishing posts, bloggers usually want to create pages. Tumblr lets you save an unstated number of pages, which differ from posts in that they are designed to always be accessible by readers (whereas posts cycle off the main page when they are outdated by others). Blogger caps the number of pages you can have at ten , but Tumblr, Posterous, and Wordpress say the sky's the limit.

If you're not sure what to put on a page, Tumblr has some ideas for you. The service lets you automatically create pages of an RSS feed, "Random" (which opens up any one of your posts at random in a new window), "Ask" (which lets readers as the blogger any question, typed into a text field), and a few others.

Tumblr also tries hard to keep blogging within the social realm, and so it offers you the option of searching your email contacts to if there's anyone you know already blogging on the site. Find them, and decide whether you want to "follow" their blogs, or encourage them to follow you.

Like Posterous, Tumblr wants to keep you blogging while you're mobile, so you can create posts from a mobile app, email message, or via phone (uploading an audio recording). Tumblr also has a one-click "reblog" button, which is similar in some ways to the "retweet" button in Twitter. The idea is that you can republish other people's content to your own blog stream.

Switching from Another Blogging Platform to Tumblr
I don't recommend ditching an existing blog platform for Tumblr, unless your goal is to greatly pare down maintenance and posting effort. Rather, seasoned bloggers might want to consider adding a Tumblr (or Posterous) account that autoupdates based on the activity that occurs on their primary blog. For example, every photo you post can autopost to Tumblr with a caption that links to your other blog, where readers can see the complete post. This is a great idea if your blog has visual elements that are underappreciated by your existing readers.

Limitations
While Posterous has almost no learning curve, Tumblr has a slight one. It does take time to get the hang of Tumblr's terminology (for example, "chat" posts) and highly graphical back-end, which confused me on several occasions. The user interface is, technically speaking, quite simple, but it's designed to look nothing like a workspace. Instead, it looks like the front end of a blog. With time and increased use, bloggers surely grow accustomed to Tumblr's unique back-end look and feel, but I was slowed down while climbing over that hump. Seeing as one of the main tenets of blogging is "post regularly," this point is actually more serious than it might sound.

Another element in Tumblr's universe that I just couldn't stand was that when you create a new image post, you can't give it a proper headline. You can only create a caption. The caption can be long, but it's not the same as a headline.

Tumblr seems to suit visual people who keep photo and artistic blogs, and it shows in the text editor, which has a teeny tiny text field for typing. In addition to being hard to see, it's not a fully WYSIWYG editor, either. Photo bloggers may not care, but writers do.

Best Uses for Tumblr
Give the popularity of Tumblr, I was surprised, that in head-to-head competition, I liked Posterous slightly more. They're both focused on microbloggers and beginning bloggers, but Posterous goes the extra distance at helping new bloggers handle the reins. More experienced bloggers might be interested in adding a Tumblr or Posterous account to auto-updated based on an existing blog, but if they're looking to switch systems entirely, they should stay away from these two. Google Blogger is the better mid-range tool, and Wordpress is our suggestion for fully-featured free online blog creation and hosting, and our overall Editors' Choice blogging platform for hosted blogs.

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