Wordpress blows. All the cool kids switched to Tumblr!

Haven’t posted in a while. Actually, it’s been over a year since I posted anything here — hell, I wish I knew why. And I get a long-lasting impression that it isn’t just me, latterly most of my favorite RSS subscriptions either went offline or fell into some kind of idleness.

See, taking a break usually helps but when it comes to blogs, it’s a different story: when you loosen up, it only gets harder and harder in time to brace yourself up. Glad I finally got over it. Well, after all I haven’t gave up on blogging yet. Plus, Tumblr is such an amazing service; it’s so neat that moving from self-hosted installation of Wordpress to a Tumblr powered blog doesn’t feel like a hard work, but more like a pleasure.

TL;DR

Feed address changed, please update your RSS readers to the new one. If you don’t, I plot to swap it really soon with a stream of videos of kids doing it and some nasty animal pictures; you’ll face criminal charges, and ultimately see each other in prison! Seriously, you will end just like that famous Polish movie director who went on a trip to Switzerland the other day, and never got back. Remember, I told you so. Seriously. Better update.

(I’m told that all modern RSS readers update themselves automatically, when given a 301 redirect. Better safe than sorry. Also, please have mercy on me for these 16 new items popping up in your readers all of a sudden; unfortunately, no way of solving this when using a redirect!)

New domain name, new site design

The blog has got a new domain name, finally a generic one. None of the Tumblr themes seemed nice, so I also took an opportiunity to come up with a new design — this time contentes of the website got into a 1-column layout, and a slighty diffrent set of colors. Looks clean, feels readable; I think I’m pretty satisfied with the end result.

Here’s what it looks like now.
Screenshot

The site looks best in Google Chrome, and all other WebKit-based browsers. Seems just fine in Firefox, and almost as good in Opera Browser (actually, if you give a miss to one nasty Opera-specific bug with CSS outlines making it through transparent background overlays, it’s even better than Gecko). From what I see in IE NetRenderer, things also look good in Internet Explorer 8; that’s nice, at least the newest version.

There’s no such tool like a “Wordpress to Tumblr” plugin

The process of blog removal went smoothly. I was planning to sort out all of my old postings anyway, so even though there’s no such tool like Wordpress to Tumblr import utility, I really didn’t need one — by any means I was planning to do all of this manually from the very beginning, so I can polish things up while on the subject. 14 entries made it through the selection — considering my writing skills back then, which were rather questionable — it’s quite an impressive number.

Technical details

People say that Tumblr is an awesome service. And that’s true, it really is; ability to run custom JavaScript being my favorite feature. But like every other thing in this world, it has got some glitches, too. I have put most of them in a list:

  • No static pages in here. If you want to get something like a static page, you ought to write a new post, and publish it as private, so it doesn’t appear in the stream. And that particular thing isn’t nice; every post has got a 9-digit long ID number in its URL, so every time you want to put a reference to the page, you gotta copy/paste the URL with the long ID in it. Not nice, definitely.

    • I worked around this one with jQuery. That’s why I love the custom JavaScript feature, without client-side scripting I wouldn’t be able to do such neat things . It’s not that I’m this much into fancy JavaScript pop-ups, I just can’t stand something with address looking like semicolons.org/private/279050831/tumblr_kuhw5lAywM1qa9lo5 being an accessible “contact me” page.

  • Inability to set a redirect. This means that if you’re into moving from self-hosted blog to Tumblr, and you don’t want to lose the track on all the links and references your website has collected so far, you ought to get yourself a new domain name.

    • So you can use the old one for redirects pointing to the new one, being your Tumblr blog.

  • You can’t upload a big picture; anything more than 700 pixels of width gets scaled down. Actually, you can post such things by email — but these get dynamic URLs, so if you want to use it for a CSS background or something, Tumblr isn’t going to help.

    • That Reddit guy, the owner of Imgur — being a student — surely can afford popular image hosting, and allow people to hotlink stuff without limits; Tumblr cannot. You know, the bandwidth, it’s so expensive. Otherwise it wouldn’t make sense.

  • The service ruins the mark-up of your posts. Not as badly as Posterous, yet still the thing gets on your nerves once in a while. Want some examples?

    • Here’s what a sane person would use to add a picture with a caption.

      Don’t ask me why HTML entities go into the RSS feed as regular characters, making things look weird in the reader. Might be Tumblr!

      • <div class="imgBlock">
            <div class="img">
                <!-- got float:left, so the frame doesn't consume 100% of its parent width -->
                <span>Picture caption</span>
                <img src="http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_pic.jpg" alt="Whatever"/>
             </div>
        </div>
        
    • This code doesn’t make it through the editor. No div, no span. Instead, you gotta use something like this.

      • <blockquote class="imgBlock">
            <p class="img">
                <b>Picture caption</b><br />
                <img src="http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_pic.jpg" alt="Whatever"/>
             </p>
        </blockquote>
    • The blockquote seems to be the only tag that Tumblr lets you use for wrapping pictures in it. Yeah, now that’s odd; I can’t think of any sane reason to prevent people from using an innocent div!

    • By the way. Forget about strong and em tags, Tumblr will convert all these to b and i. Dunno, maybe they want to save on bandwidth.

    • Also, due to an iframe injected by default into all Tumblr blogs, this very page isn’t a valid HTML 5 document.

Alright, that would be all. I’ll fill that Opera bug report now, and I guess it would be enough of blogging for me this year. Oh my, I almost forgot — I turned off the comments. No more “I like this post!“ coming from fellows writing themselves as “Buy cheap LCDs”. Now I’m looking forward to hearing from you .

Right, email. I mean, that old-fashioned, pre-Web 2.0, Google Wave kind of thing. You used that when activating your profile on Facebook, didn’t you. Remember now? My, oh my — you almost forgot! Bet you got some junk in there!