Respectfully, I Disagree
This morning, Pat Dryburgh posted an interesting article on his blog on choosing a blogging platform. As I’ve mentioned before, Patrick is someone who I respect and admire, but in this case, there are a few points that I have to disagree with in his article.
Patrick mentions that whenever someone asks him what they should use to start a blog he points them towards Tumblr and Facebook. Leaving Facebook aside, because I personally don’t understand how you can blog with it, I personally don’t feel comfortable recommending Tumblr to someone who wants to start blogging. My reasons for not feeling comfortable recommending Tumblr, are pretty much the same reasons that Patrick does recommend it.
Tumblr is certainly an easy to use platform, with little to no barrier to entry, but that belies its shortcomings in my opinion. Patrick mentions that geeks like us will complain about things such as data portability, and control over the software we use, but I personally believe that this is a concern for anyone who wants to blog.
Everytime we write a blog post, we are making an investment into our blog—an investment of time, energy, and commitment. Given my background in banking and finance, I liken this to making a deposit into a savings account. Would you deposit money into a savings account that you can’t withdraw from if you need to? This is the way I see Tumblr—a blogging platform that provides no way of withdrawing your investment.
Patrick also argues that he tries his hardest not to force frustration upon people he cares about, but my personal opinion is that by avoiding a mild level of frustration at the start of someone’s blogging “career”, he may be setting them up for even more frustration if and when that person outgrows the recommended solution.
I started blogging about 6 years ago, using Google’s Blogger service, which, much the same as Tumblr1, has next to no barrier to entry, but after time I outgrew the capabilities of the system, and the limitations became too much to bear, so I moved to a self hosted WordPress blog. I was able to import my entries from Blogger into that blog, with little to no effort. The frustrations caused by doing this from Tumblr are much higher than the initial frustrations of setting up a WordPress blog from the word go. Ask my friend Ian Hines about moving from Tumblr to WordPress, and I’m almost certain he would say the same thing.
Patrick also mentions that if Tumblr were to come out with an awesome iPad app, he would recommend the purchase of an iPad and the downloading of the Tumblr software, stating
How could you go wrong with two of the most beginner-friendly products on the market today?
Oh, right — they aren’t “open.” Well, I’m sorry, but “open” is not synonymous with “awesome.”
Its probably the long-haired, open source loving, linux hippie that is deep inside of me, but locking someone into a proprietary system because its “beginner-friendly” and “awesome” despite its lack of openness is shortsighted in my opinion. I do agree that “open” isn’t synonymous with “awesome”, but I’ll personally take an open, if slightly awkward and initially frustrating, option over an awesome, but short-sighted, and locked down option.
In closing, I respectfully disagree with Patrick, although I can see where he is coming from, and why he is coming from there; and I hope I haven’t offended him. If you have an opinion on the matter, have your say in the comments.
Footnotes
- Although not as cool, or as pretty, or with as much mindshare amongst geeks. ↩
2 Comments
Pat
Hey Dean,
Great thoughts, and very well articulated!
You’ve definitely hit on all of the main bits, and have come out on the opposite side of my own. That is great, and is truly what blogging is all about!
I do want to point out a couple of things:
1) Tumblr does have a way to port your site’s content from its system. Check out Marco’s blog on the Tumblr backup utility. This tool exports your posts into html files, written in open standards.
2) You are right to say that there is chance for frustration down the road. However, frustration once someone is at least somewhat familiar with how things work compared to when first starting out is considerably different. Is it ideal? No. However, as a matter of opinion, I much prefer a closed system that works to an open system that just causes frustration.
I doubt we’ll ever agree on this, as we are coming at this from different ideals. However, I am definitely glad the discussion is out in the open, and hopefully people will realize that there are other choices out their if their current choice is slowing them down! ;)
Deanacus
Wow. Thanks for stopping by and leaving a comment Pat.
Thanks for reminding me of the Tumblr backup app. I hadn’t ever thought about that as a means of data portability, or a way to import content into another system, but when you put it that way, you are definitely right.
I can definitely appreciate the preference for a closed system that works. Thats exactly why I use a Mac instead of a Linux PC for day to day computing.
Now, off to edit the typos that are staring me in the face. That’ll teach me not to edit before publishing.