Ikiru Design

There’s a well-worn maxim very relevant to the life and death of this site: “only a poor craftsman blames his tools.”

The tool we’re talking about here is 2004 Compaq Presario X1000 laptop that has been my primary computer since that year. It runs Window XP, has 1.6 screaming gigahertz, and can barely stay usable if you try to do two things at once. (Don’t even ask about playing Flash videos smoothly.)

I’m too focused on other monetary goals to purchase a new computer until I really need one. But with regards to programming-type activities, I’ve been letting my computer’s deliberateness serve as my excuse to do nothing about getting better at them. This is due primarily to a fundamental misunderstanding of how real work gets done real workers.

Surely, I’m not completely wrong in the thinking that a faster computer running the Mac OS I’ve been lusting over pretty much as long as I’ve had this computer would increase my ability to do these things. Surely Coda’s a nicer piece of software than one can easily find for web design on Windows (especially when you’re unwilling to spend money because you intend to stop using it… sometime). But that’s not really the reason I’ve not gotten better at this internet creating thing.

To extend the opening idea, a craftsman very dedicated to carving wood will do it with rocks if that’s all he has. A man who insists that he can only make something interesting with $4000 of equipment has no real interest in making things with wood. We may be able to say he’s interested in the idea of making things with wood, but no one should be considered serious about a project he isn’t working on regularly. This is the hard truth that I’m still working on learning fully.

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.

It has been more than two years — that thing they say about years going faster as you get older is true — since I published a post here. Quite nearly as long since I did anything at all on this site. I can’t say that I’ve really missed it. While I do sometimes enjoy making things using internet languages, I’ve never had a degree of mastery that makes that making a constantly-fun thing to do.

Lately I’ve been itching to be better are this whole web design and development thing, but that doesn’t mean I miss the 20 minute hunts to realize I forgot a semicolon. (This may not be a problem you face frequently, greater master of the coding arts, but its one this distractable newbie has faced many times.) But whether I was missing this aspect of the web or am just hoping to be better at it, the best way to remedy either of these states is to do it more.

And so I’m hoping to do here what I did on my essay-based blog about a year ago: set myself hard and clear deadlines and hold to them. Since I resolved to publish once a month over there, I’ve not missed. Much of the stuff was hard to make myself do, competing as it was for my non-infinite free time against massively enjoyable and very easy things. Compared to the other things I do with my free time, writing’s hard work. So is coding. Even CSS is hard compared with all the easily accessible and fun alternatives my privileged life presents me.

But I mean it. It is now resolved that on the first of the month I will require myself to publish a post at this blog. Some of those will doubtless reflect 35 hours of dinking around in text editors and FTP clients. Others will probably be just an interesting thing that I thought of that seemed relevant to these topics. But in either case they will at least represent some small effort to be better at this “web thing”, and so I’ll get better, even if only at a crawl.

This site is no longer dead.

Weeks have a way of getting away from me. Last weekend I was thinking I’d get a post up about my first WordPress plugin, a stand-alone implementation of the Kaleidoscope Mini Quilt, by Tuesday. Suddenly I look down and realize that it’s Sunday and I’ve not written such a post and not updated the plugin’s page beyond a goofy first draft.

If you’re familiar with Kaleidoscope, you know it’s most unique feature is the algorithm that takes the date a post was published and determines a color that, based on some vague ideas of what colors fit what time of year, seems appropriate.

My original implementation of that was a large quilt-looking series of patchs that you can find on my archives page. And while I do like that — and the fact that it gives post names as well as colors — it requires someone to create and click to an archives page to see the best use of the algorithm.

The Mini Quilt was a way that I could have the quilt-looking array of posts, but offer it on every page of any WordPress blog, regardless of the existence of an archives page.

Well, I like the Mini Quilt, and I got a few requests from people who liked it too, so I built a plugin to allow anyone to add it to any widgetized WordPress theme. If also features simple but useful controls that allow you to quickly change patch size, and the number of patches in it to fit any size and show any number of posts.

To use it, you just need to search for the Mini Quilt plugin from inside your WordPress dashboard and install it (still from your dashboad — you’re using WordPress 2.7+, right?). Once it’s installed, activate the plugin and add the widget to your sidebar. It couldn’t be much simpler.

If you’re looking for more information before you take the above steps, you can try the plugin’s page here at Ikiru Design, or at the WordPress plugin repository.

Are, in rough order of nobleness:

1. Because no one else has made anything like this before and I’m sure it’ll be awesome.
2. Because no one has ever combined these feature sets and the combination will be legen — dramatic pause — dary.
3. Because this platform needs this type of software.
4. Because my version will be way better than all the others.
5. Because building it will teach me something.
6. Because I can do it too.