tumblelogging

I mentioned before that I've considered moving away from a self-hosted blog to a service-hosted one, but decided not to for three reasons.

1. It's a huge pain in the ass to move six years of content, especially considering there's no automatic way of doing it.
2. It's way too easy for someone to get your blog canned just by going flag-happy.
3. I don't have enough faith in a service-hosted blog to believe it will be there tomorrow.

Another note on point 3: Since there's no automatic import/export for content, even if you had a full local backup of your blog and had to repost it to another service, every single post you ever wrote would have to be reposted, then modified to reflect the original post date. Can you imagine doing that 100 times in a row? How about 500? How about 1,000? Sound bad? I'd have to do it over 2,000 times.

One thing I really like about Tumblr (one of the platforms I considered moving to) is its back-to-basics approach to blogging. All blogs on Tumblr are minimalist by design. Since I'm not about to move my content elsewhere, I decided to do the next best thing and redesign this site to have that super-minimalist look.

It does take a while before you realize that with a blog, the only thing people truly care about is the content and nothing else. A very good example of this is Daring Fireball. You wouldn't think that's a high-traffic Mac blog but it is - and the guy who authors it doesn't allow comments and never has. And that site is even more minimalist than what I'm using right now.

It is better overall not to have my site injected with a bunch of crap nobody cares about that slowed down the load time, like the Facebook 'like box' thing I used to have. People don't come here to see my Facebook public stuff, they come here to read the blog.

For the time being I'm going to try out the tumblelog-style to see how it fares out. I like it so far, but we'll what happens over time.