Ikiru Design

My first article on the merits of Tumblr and WordPress was written for the rather specific things that I desired in a link-blogging engine. (The linkblog I made is called Link Banana, if you’re interested.) I think what I wrote does cover that well, but in the intervening years that post experienced some unexpectedly strong Google mojo and still sees a respectable volume of traffic from people looking for a basic comparison of the two platforms. That piece wasn’t very good for that purpose, and the battle has changed a fair amount in the intervening years, so to better help people wondering how to start a blog I’ve redone the comparison with a more universal mindset.

To Begin

Tumblr is an engine built for “tumbling” or “tumble blogging” or various other derivatives in that direction. In short, it’s built for you to collect things (photos, videos, quotations, links…) from the internet & sundry and present it to the world in a unified & pretty looking site. While it is absolutely possible to use Tumblr to write 24 paragraph essays in the context of a broad and fully-featured site, it’s not it’s primary goal.

WordPress is the premier blogging platform in the style of old. It’s got great features for the person who’s looking to mostly publish longish essays. It’s recently been extended so that you can effectively use it like Tumblr, but it’s not the core mission and as a newish feature hardly has the robustness of the rest of WordPress.

It should also be noted that WordPress can mean two different things. WordPress.com is a free and easy way to publish a blog. WordPress.org is a free and rather easy way to start and publish a blog on your own webserver and your own web address. Essentially, you have to pay for hosting to use WordPress.org with all it’s customizability. Most people who are interested in a comparison are likely new to this whole blogging thing, and so interested in WordPress.com. As such, that will be the primary comparison here.

I’d also like to take the opportunity to note that while these two are the best free blogging tools to my eyes, they’re not the only ones. Google’s Blogger, long languishing, is finally getting some updates to make the back-end feel less like it’s from last decade. Posterous, which I’ve never fully grasped, has many satisfied users. LiveJournal still exists, though it hasn’t been the cool kids spot in a decade. But if neither of these tools I describe strike your fancy, don’t give up. Look around.

Social Features

We’ve already established that both WordPress.com and Tumblr have the ability to handle your writings, quotations, pictures, etc. Given that both are adequate at the task, most of the big differentiators are external to that calculation. (Though we will talk more about it later.)

One of the features of Tumblr that I completely neglected in the last blogging battle is its most compelling. The ability to follow people and get the latest from everywhere on your dashboard. The neophyte’s explanation of this is “your Facebook newsfeed for Tumblr”. The old pro’s explanation is that this is a “highly social RSS reader that encourages responses.” In either case, the ability to like things, “reblog” — quote their post and then add a response — and reply directly means that you get a way to not only make a blog, but follow and interact with your friends and people you admire. This is, to use a third technology analogy you may not get, a more complete and compelling version of Twitter. And like Twitter, its usefulness is largely determined by the number of people you’re interested in that are on Tumblr.

WordPress.com has a feature somewhat similar to this — they call it “My Subscriptions” and it’s implementation is about as dry as it sounds. While it’s a serviceable RSS feed reader — way to stay current on what a group of people is saying in one single location — and it does offer “reblog” and “like” buttons, both it’s design and function are left in the dust by Tumblr. The whole thing feels like a feature bolted onto the core WordPress experience, rather than integral as it is on Tumblr.

Advantage: Tumblr

See What I’m Talking About

Writing

There are a number of ways to write and a number of reasons to. That’s to say that I’ve set this up as virtually unwinnable. If you’re interested in writing a personal journal or long discursive essays, and you intend to do that in situ (that is: in your blogging software, rather than in MS Word, text files, etc) WordPress almost certainly offers the better and more complete experience. It’s got a full screen writing mode (of which a far better version is imminent), a spell checker, easy formatting, and strong style controls.

If you’re mostly looking to respond to things your friends and heroes said or drew or photographed, Tumblr is simply unbeatable. The ease with which you can grab the content you’re looking to respond to, dash off your few paragraphs and have that live on the web is crazy when you compare it to WordPress. Coupled with the Tumblr dashboard’s aggregating features, WordPress looks even more like a dinosaur. But the compose screen on Tumblr is comparatively modest, offering only the bare essentials of what you may possibly want if you aim to publish on the web.

Advantage: WordPress for longer discursive writing, Tumblr for quick dashes and reactions

Reliability

That I didn’t mention this last time is a testament to both my relative inexperience with the platforms and the relative stability of both at the time. Around the time that I wrote the last match-up, Twitter was renowned for being constantly down, unable to cope with the load of it’s users.

Today, if any single site on the internet deserves that description it’s Tumblr. How long these problems will persist is unknowable, but in the last few months it seems that the “wild tumbeasts” — Tumblr’s answer to Twitter’s “Fail Whale” — are winning. It’s certainly not constant downtime, or even predictable, but it’s frequent enough that casual use meets with slowness and frustration. Surely some combination of increased server power and decreased user demand will eventually remedy this problem, but the bad taste and memories do the platform no favors.  Up-to-date information about Tumblr’s uptime is easy to accessed on Chad Scira’s Tumblr Uptime page. (The page’s existence is itself a sign of how bad the problem has been.)

WordPress.com certainly isn’t perfect (for example) nor has it had 100% up-time in the last year, but compared to Tumblr it seems rock solid. A less anecdotal, but still imperfect, study demonstrating this point can also be found at the Royal Pingdom blog.

Advantage: WordPress

Money

If you blanched at the suggestion of money, let me assure you, both WordPress.com and Tumblr are essentially free. Free to write on, free to publish on, free to be read on. But that’s not  all there is to it.

One of the best things about Tumblr is that it doesn’t yet have to make money, flooded as it is with venture capital dollars. One of the scariest things about Tumblr is that they don’t yet have to make money, flush today with venture capital sure they can eventually “monetize” the service. What I’m saying is: Tumblr currently lets you run whatever theme you want, on whatever domain you want, using as much space as you want, without ever having a single ad on your site and all for free. While this is clearly great today, some day its venture capitalists will want to see revenue from all the popularity, and Tumblr will have to find a way to make money. Something will inevitably be lost in that transition.

Automattic, the company that runs WordPress.com, is plenty profitable. And a large part of that is charging for almost all of the features mentioned in the last paragraph. Using CSS to style your WordPress.com blog the way you want is $15/year. Ensuring no ads are ever displayed on your site — WordPress.com interjects them randomly, usually to people coming from search engines — is $30/year. Five gigabytes of extra space is $20/year. These fees are hardly exorbitant, but they aren’t zero, which is what Tumblr is offering today.

Advantage: Tumblr, but the victory may be temporary

Random Bits

Tumblr supports tagging, but not all themes do. WordPress.com supports both tags and categories, though their categories work most like Tumblr tags, showing only results from your blog. (This is a place where one may prefer WordPress.org, as both work for just your blog with self-hosted WordPress installs.)

WordPress has comments by default. Tumblr doesn’t. Disqus is probably the most popular way to add them to Tumblr.

Tumblr creates pretty archives pages, but they’re slow to load and I’ve never found them all that useful. WordPress.com only offers access to archives in the sidebar by date or category, which I believe is even more useless.

In Conclusion

My judgements have ended up in about the place they were last time. For sheer comprehensiveness and ease of use, Tumblr still wins. It’s a beautiful tool that can be used in myriad ways and while reliability is currently a real concern, that is likely to wane.

WordPress.com is a better overall platform if you’re looking to do blogging the way it’s been done for nearly a decade. It’s more robust, has more features, and is very stable. It’s got the best post-writing interface of anything on the market.

And so, the TL;DR (Too Long; Didn’t Read, for non-internet people) version of this review is this: if you know and like people using Tumblr, it’s polish and community are unchallenged by WordPress. If you’re just looking for a way to write things on the internet, WordPress.com is still the best thing available.

I was working on another post (here’s the first) about improving your WordPress Archives pages when I realized that some may not even know how to show the one they already have. If that’s your situation, fear not: it’s very easy, and I’ve got pictures.

Essentially, to get the archives(.php) page included in the theme you’re using to display, you have to create a page with the Archives template applied to it. If that’s sufficient for you to do it, feel free to stop reading. If you’re still a little confused, read on.

Since I also don’t have an archives page (as of this writing), you can follow along as I create one.

First, from the dashboard, click on “Write.”

Then, click “Write Page.”

Title the page, I chose the bland but useful “Archives.” In almost all cases this will only by used to determine the the text that links to the page. It’s rare (but not impossible) for the archives page to reflect the title you gave it.

Locate and enlarge the “Page Template” box in the right sidebar.

Change the page template, to “Archives” it should be there for most themes. If it’s not you’ll either need to put a new archives.php into the theme’s folder, or use a new theme. But we’ll move on like you’ve found it.

Press “Publish,” and bask in the glow of work well done. See my result here.