The Switch to Tumblr
After 5 years using a self-hosted WordPress installation I’ve switched to Tumblr. The tumblelog has been renamed and valhallaisland.com points here now. A complete mirror of the old Valhalla Island sits at archive.valhallaisland.com and the FeedBurner feed points to the Tumblr feed URL. All this stuff might take a while to settle down.
Just last week I wrote about how I’d love to use Tumblr but couldn’t work out where it fit between Valhalla Island, Twitter and other online services. I started using it, trying to let it find it’s own place.
Using Tumblr is the joy that I didn’t know I’d lost in blogging. I love the Tumblr platform, UI, the community and the brilliant content people are using it to create. The feeling around Tumblr now is the feeling there was around WordPress five years ago.
After my trial period Tumblr’s place still wasn’t exactly clear, I continued to struggle with where I should publish and I didn’t like having to separate myself into personal and semi-professional categories. What was clear after the trial was that I enjoyed posting to Tumblr more than I have enjoyed posting to the blog in a long time. In my infinite quest to consolidate and find the ideal setup and workflows it made sense to merge WordPress into Tumblr.
You can expect the same level of editorial quality here as you could at the old Valhalla Island (whether you consider it high or low) but with a thicker stream of content including more personal and not-necessarily-related-to-computers stuff.
Every link on the internet that pointed to a post at Valhalla Island will now be broken, there’s nothing I can do about it and I’m not bothered, it feels good to start fresh.
Switching to Tumblr means relinquishing complete control of every minute detail involved in running a blog. I see it as a positive thing. Tumblr lets me ignore the details and just post. I can still completely customise the look of my tumblelog and if ever I need it the API let’s me at my raw data.
It feels great to be excited about publishing again.