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 lot of work. More like having fun, actually.

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 random pictures taken from the depths of 4chan; eventually you’ll face criminal charges for browsing these horrible horrible pictures, and 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 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.

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 rather questionable writing skills back then — it’s quite an impressive number.

Technical details

People say Tumblr is awesome. 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’ve got to 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 like this. 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 custom URL redirects. 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, yet 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 may get on your nerves once in a while. Want some examples?
- Here’s what a sane person would use to post 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">
          
          <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, perhaps again saving on bandwidth.
- Also, due to an iframe injected by default into all Tumblr blogs, this 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 via email.

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!

13/12/09