When choosing a blogging platform, don’t overlook Tumblr, the barebones hosted service cum social network. The key feature of Tumblr is how easy it is to post a nugget of information you found on the web. Whether it’s a picture, a video, a link, or a quote, all you have to do is click on a bookmarklet on your browser bar, add some optional comments, and it’s published to your site. Reblogging posts by others using Tumblr is encouraged and easy to do with one click.
This simplicity is why I use it for my personal site. You might not have time to compose long blog posts, but you can certainly click a button to share the cool things you find online. You can also post by emailing pictures, video, and text to a secret email assigned to you. This means mobile posting from your phone. If you like, Tumblr will also tweet out for you each time you post.
When I developed a new version of Paperclippy, a shopping blog for professional women, I chose Tumblr because it would make it so easy to maintain. Kathleen, who edits the site, surfs for cool stuff to post. When she finds something, she hits the bookmarklet and it brings up an editing panel where she can write her post. These then go into a queue so that she can amass dozens of posts if she wanted to, and then Tumblr will post them however you specify (we have it set to publisher three posts a day between 8 and 11 a.m.). At the same time it publishes, Tumblr tweets the posts and adds it to the Paperclippy page on Facebook. Finally, other Tumblr users who follow the site see it in their “dashboard” and can reblog the content.
Tumblr is easy to set up, offers a good deal of customization, and is incredibly easy to use, especially for web novices. Check it out if you don’t need all the overhead of a self-hosted CMS like WordPress or Drupal.
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