My tumblr issues
I’ve been using tumblr for a day now. Got it setup to work on my own domain, had to put it on a subdomain so I didn’t mess with other stuff on the domain. This is pretty great. I’ve chosen a decent looking theme, added disqus and flattr buttons to try and get a bit more content/referrals coming in.
Obviously, this sounds like a great service, but it’s missing a few things, and requires more effort in some areas than it should.
Post Editor
This is a major point of concern. The “Rich text editor” used for creating posts, is completing lacking basic functionality. I have options to bold,italicize,strike the text. Order it in lists, add an image and links, and put texts in a blockquote:
like this
But at the end of the day, none of that is actually useful in creating a nice post. There’s no method of creating headers, changing font style or size without jumping in to html mode. Due to this, I’m writing my blog posts, in HTML, which is just a bad thing to be doing if you want people who don’t understand HTML to be using the product.
Widgets
The theme I chose has a great section on the right, for things to go. I was hoping for a list of widget or something I could chose to be put in that area, things like twitter or facebook updates.
Of course, there was nothing. I had to manually add a twitter block, in HTML again, modify some CSS and add a clearing div so the “Following” section didn’t steal the twitter sections space. Again, this is all fine for me, I’m a web developer, it took me about 5 seconds to read the code and work out what I had to do to get it showing where and how I wanted, the average user will just assume it’s impossible without outside help
Comments
As I said earlier, I had to manually add comments using disqus (seemed to be what everyone else was using, so I went with it). Some themes apparently allow you to add disqus comments very easily, which is quite nice. The theme I chose didn’t, once again I was into the HTML off to edit some CSS and work out where to put various blocks of code.
I’m still struggling to get rid of some bugs with this. Not all post types have a comments link, and one post even has had the title changed to the amount of comments it’s received. Which is a really amusing bug when you think about it. When viewing the post itself, the layout seems to explode, so I’ve got some more digging about in CSS to do to get this working correctly.
More to the point though, what semi decent blogging software(other than tumblr apparently) doesn’t have it’s own commenting system? It’s absolutely rediculous.
Theming
Maybe this is just the theme I’ve chosen, but I don’t have the ability to change ANYTHING other than the background image without once again, editing the HTML. I shouldn’t have needed to edit any HTML at any point during setting up my blog, unless I was making strange modifications (flattr mostly). I hope they learn the issue with this before a lot of potential users just leave because they can’t do what they want.
Twitter Integration
I’m putting this issue under twitter, although it may be an issue with the bookmarklet.
I have attached my twitter account to tumblr, so I can easily tweet about a new post on the blog, this is great and I can see myself using this a lot. On the current page, I’ve got a checkbox “Send to Twitter” and the ability to edit the message: “Blog: My thoughts on #tumblr [URL]”. It will tweet out that message I send, replacing [URL] with a short URL to the blog post.
The issue comes when I’m using the “Share on tumblr” booknarklet, this allows me to quickly add a page/video/picture etc to my blog, without going through the hassle of copy pasting URLs. The problem is, there is no “Send to Twitter” checkbox, it is automatically checked. I don’t want to tweet about everything I add to my blog, I like to keep my twitter about slightly thoughtful messages, no video links to the funny cat video I found on youtube.
Stats
I admit it, I’m a man obsessed with numbers, all I want is to see everything in terms of numbers. The problem comes when this is not available to me. I want to know if people are reading my blog, how they got there, if they come back, if they click on any individual posts etc etc. This is both useful information and interesting to me. From what I can tell, tumblr offers me nothing, absolutely nothing. I have no clue if people are reading my blog. I know if they “like” my posts, but that doesn’t really mean anything if 90% of your readers aren’t registered on tumblr
