Tumblr: An Introduction Guide For Microblogging – Part 1
Matthew Corner
Tumblr is set to become the blogging tool of 2010 with its massive growth, yet still many people don’t fully understand what Tumblr does, or how it works. If you’ve ever tried to start a blog, but found yourself struggling to find the time, Tumblr is something you’re definitely going to want to take a look at.
What is tumblr?
Put simply, Tumblr is a service that does exactly what WordPress does for blogging, but for microblogging, or tumbleblog’s instead. To fully understand what Tumblr does, you first need to understand what these so-called tumbleblog’s actually are.
A tumblelog is a variation of a blog, that favors short-form, mixed-media posts over the longer editorial posts frequently associated with blogging. Common post formats found on tumbleblogs include links, photos, quotes, dialogues, and video. Unlike blogs, this format is frequently used to share the author’s creations, discoveries, or experiences without providing a commentary. – Wikipedia
What does this mean? Well basically, Tumblr fills the gap between Twitter, where people tweet resources, images, and thoughts, and traditional blogging platforms, like WordPress where each post is a proper article. Instead, Tumblr works with seven types of post; text, photo, quote, link, chat, audio and video, and it handles them all very well.
Why is Tumblr becoming increasingly popular?
According to Tumblr statistic’s, in the last six months, Tumblr has grown from around 300M monthly page views, to over 1 Billion in February 2010; a massive growth for any product, and it speaks for itself really. A product doesn’t grow at such a rapid rate, if people aren’t enjoying using it.
Easy to update
The biggest reason behind Tumblr’s growing support, is it’s vast number of social features, and it’s ease of use. For a start, Tumblr make it extremely offer for you to post to your blog, even if you can’t access your homepage yourself. Here are some of the clever ways Tumblr makes it possible for you to update your tumbleblog:
- Text your blog updates from any mobile phone
- Email your updates via one of the most sophisticated email publishing platform available.
- A Bookmarklet allows you to post anything and everything you come across while browsing the web.
- Post via AIM by messaging TumblrBot.
- Phone your TumblrBlog, and leave voice posts.
- Automatically post from any other site or profile.
- Use the official Tumblr iPhone app to easily update your blog.
- Third Party App’s expand your options even further.
3rd Party Applications
As well as the fantastic free iPhone app that is available officially from Tumblr, you also have access to a multitude of applications for the iPhone, Web, Desktop’s, Mobile’s, Widget’s and Browser’s. They are all filed away tidily in an official Tumblr app directory.
Social Network Integration
Definitely high up on the list of reasons for Tumblr’s acceptance has been its solid two-way integration with other social media, and networking services. Part of its automatic posting from other sites come from major names such as Digg, Youtube, Facebook and Twitter, but it doesn’t stop there. As well as having the ability to automatically pull in your content live from these sites, you can also send information back. Facebook is a prime example with its ability to show your activity on Tumblr on your Facebook wall, keeping all your friends up to date with what your blogging and activity.
Other notable features
Other than those already mentioned, Tumblr also focus’ on those important, but small things that you need.
- Easily add any analytics tracking code you want to your tumbleblog
- Tubmlr is optimised for Google in everything from the site slugs, to the sitemap
- Built in privacy allows you to restrict specific posts, or your whole blog to certain people
- The ability to use your own custom domains on your tumbleblog
- FeedBurner support allows you to see important RSS feed stats
- It’s free, and you don’t need to pay for hosting, or storage!
- You have the ability to create your own custom theme.
What is the backend of Tumblr like?
First off, Tumblr wouldn’t be where it was if it wasn’t for its easy to use backend user interface. The interface is split into two sections; the dashboard, where your’s and other peoples content meet you, and customisation, where you control all sorts of aspects of your tumbleblog.
Dashboard
Posting any of the seven different type’s of content from your dashboard is a breeze, with visual buttons, and a clean design. The backend goes on to keep you up-to-date with all the Tumbleblogs you are following, in a very Twitter like manner, keeping it clean and easy to read. For a look at how the dashboard looks, click on the image below.
Customisation
Customisation though, is a whole different kettle of fish. It is basically a dummy page of your current theme, with one default entry in each of the seven post categories. A menu bar at the top of the page allows you to make many important, and useful changes and decisions that affect your tumbleblog.
The menu provides a multitude of options;
- Info - This allows you to specify the basic information of your blog; things like your blog title, description, and avatar picture. The notable option here though, is the ability to change your tumbleblog url instantly, or even use your own personal domain allowing you to use a domain without the tumblr.com suffix.
- Theme – This menu item is fairly self-explanatory; it allows you to select a theme from Tumblr’s “theme garden” to use for your blog. There are over 300 of them, all for free, some of which are of an impressive quality. As well as using a premade theme though, you are given the option to use “custom html”, another way of saying your own custom-made theme, something we will go through in great detail at a later date.
- Appearance – This allows you to make quick changes to your current theme. Not every theme has appearance options, but the default Tumblr theme certainly does, and allows you to change things such as font’s, colour’s, and background images without touching any code; anther thing that makes Tumblr so popular for those that are not so comfortable delving into code.
- Pages – This allows you to create static pages, much like other blogging platforms such as wordpress. Pages come in three categories; Standard Layout, Custom Layout, and Redirect.
- Services – Already I have mentioned the great amount of social networking integration that Tumblr has, as well as its integration with other web services such as YouTube and Feedburner. Services allows you to pick and choose which of these services you want to use, and lets you connect all your accounts up.
- Community – This allows you to add, as the title dictates, a community element to your blog. There are to ways to do this. One is the creation of a page that allows your readers to ask you questions, and the other allows your users to contribute their own posts to your submission queue for approval by you.
- Advanced – The final menu item features further options for your blog that don’t really fit into the other categories. These are things like your timezone, url slug structure, privacy options, post’s per page, and so on.
As you change these options, especially your theme options, the dummy page below changes to mirror the choices you have made, allowing you to check how your blog will look, as you work.
Conclusion
Tumblr is a fantastic piece of kit, filling in that gap in the market between products such as wordpress that provide full blogs, social networking such as facebook, and status updating from Twitter, and it does it extremely well. Tumblr is honestly a pleasure to work with. Simplicity makes the user interface effect and easy to use, and you never feel like there isn’t anything important missing, or out of your control. It makes blogging and sharing things you find on the internet a breeze, and most importantly, unlike Twitter, it does so visually. If you find yourself failing to keep a full blog up-to-date, and enjoy sharing the things you find, the there’s no easier way to do so than Tumblr, so give it a go.
Keep an eye here at 1stwebdesigner for more on Tumblr!
For those that do choose to start using Tumblr, or already do, then keep an eye here, because coming up are several articles that will increase your happiness with Tumblr, such as a roundup of fantastic themes, and more importantly learning how to create your own custom theme! For now, check out these 5 impressive tumbleblogs for inspiration to see what Tumblr is truly capable of.
Metalab
It’s the interwebs
Mark Jardine
Tmblg
Name that film
Hope you enjoyed this post – keep coming back for more!
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g—
Posted 97 days ago 60“Built in privacy allows you to restrict specific posts, or your whole blog to certain people”
But how? I’d like to have a multi-level approach to who can view websites. I’d love if some posts could be public, some could be seen by people who follow me/I follow, and some could be seen by only select followers. But how? Is this possible?
jess
Posted 134 days ago 59what date was this published?
CraftBella
Posted 145 days ago 58Thx Matt, you helped me to really understand “How” to use Tumblr and “How” it works and did so in a simple easy to understand way. Much Appreciation. As for the comments on your grammar, take it in stride. Yes there are some grammatical errors that interrupt the reading flow a bit but overall your article accomplished the end goal. Thx again. And to person who made the comments, when giving feedback or advice you might want to consider “how” you phrase that advice, that is if you’re really trying to be “helpful.”
Matt Good Luck with your goals on tackling CSS3 and all…I’m still struggling with basic CSS, LOL. Looking forward to more great “helpful” post from you.
Abigail
Posted 175 days ago 55HOW DO YOU SUBSCRIBE?!?! I don’t know what URL to put!!!!
Rean John Uehara
Posted 175 days ago 56You can visit http://www.facebook.com/webdesignblog if you want to be updated always!
min
Posted 246 days ago 52As soon as I came over to this blog post I can only look at part of it, is this my internet cell phone browser or the internet web site? Should I restart?
Rean John Uehara
Posted 246 days ago 53Uhm, I don’t understand..?
Lannie Lockbaum
Posted 247 days ago 51I adore your blog site! Just wantet to post something.
memorycow
Posted 285 days ago 50very nice understanding
Josh
Posted 323 days ago 49There’s a great video the explains what tumblr is in one minute here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5C47FUM6lgk
LemonFresh
Posted 401 days ago 47You’ve got a serious problem with apostrophes in this article… they do NOT indicate plurals! I actually stopped reading and started skimming this because of the grammar mistakes. (I know, I’m being that douchey person on the Internet, but I assume you’re trying to put across an aura of professionalism here…)
Skweekah
Posted 387 days ago 48Yeah, Im with this douche. The apostrophes are a turnoff.
Susan
Posted 213 days ago 54You’re right…you are being that person. Most ‘tech’ people are not great writers. I didn’t come here for a grammar lesson. Go away, or start your own blog.
K Rhine
Posted 173 days ago 57Oh thank you LemonFresh — those apostrophes were driving me crazy, too.
Lilian Nattel
Posted 491 days ago 46Can Tumblr autopost? I find it does fine with FB but doesn’t import well via rss feed and doesn’t export well to Twitter. What I like about Posterous are the autoposts. It can send posts about anywhere. I’m looking for something within tumblr that’s the same but can’t find it.
Brett
Posted 741 days ago 44Matt. Nice info. How easy is it to set up Tumblr to look similar to a website with more form and structure? Do I need a designer to do it?
Matt Corner
Posted 714 days ago 45Tumblr is what it is, a blogging tool. It now has support for “pages”, but you are unlikely to get anywhere near the sort of custom websites that you can have with say, wordpress.
What tumblr does is make microblogging easy to the masses. It isnt really intended to support a full website.
Vincent
Posted 781 days ago 43Interesting and informative. Tumblr never crossed my mind.
Gilliom
Posted 786 days ago 42a Tumblr blog does seem like a good idea for something like a portfolio, or rather, for something in between a portfolio and a sketchbook-type blog like a lot of artists seem to have, something where they can post sketches or work in progress. A lot of people enjoy these “behind the scenes/look in the kitchen” kind of things so it might be a good way to connect with people who like your work.
Nice article. Thanks.
.-= Gilliom´s last blog ..Vintage Movie Posters: Sci Fi =-.
Andrew Kelsall
Posted 790 days ago 39I’m one of those people who has heard of Tumblr mentioned before, but thought it was just a free alternative to CMS sites like WordPress.
As a result of this article, I think I’ll look into it, but not swayed as yet. I think I’ll be sticking with WordPress, which also has a growing user-base on top of its already-massive following.
Times do change, though…
.-= Andrew Kelsall´s last blog ..100 Fantastic Design Blogs (and their logos) =-.
Matt Corner
Posted 788 days ago 40It certainly depends what your goal is. For example, are you after a blogging platform, or a CMS? If you’re after blogging, is it a personal blog, or a sophisticated articles blog. There are many variables.
Jim Carter III
Posted 793 days ago 38I just decided to drop my 6 year old wordpress blog and make the switch, starting today. I’m pretty excited for the breath of fresh air.
.-= Jim Carter III´s last blog ..times change, so does blogging =-.