Chair Blog | Tumblr
Last edited January 27, 2010
1) General
This page is a work in progress.
As a two finger typist I’m too slow in producing a post to my own liking, even if there is only one photo and one sentence in a post. So I have been looking for a way to quicken this process continuously. Here I will share several experiments with you.
2) Tumblr
On Februari 23, 2008 I had discovered Tumblr and started Chair Blog | Tumblr, with the general idea of using that as a scrapbook to collect items that I could flesh out for this blog. However after a couple of months copying and pasting I came to the conclusion that I would prefer the content rather here on Chair Blog. Moreover I had discovered the Quickpress plugin for WordPress that could do what I wanted (at least partially).
From the start I believed that in one way or another it should be possible to integrate Tumblr into your own Blog, be it via an RSS import or not. However the only quick and dirty possibility I found I could work with is a Java script that automatically inserts the last 10 posts of your Tumblr account where you want it. See for the result paragraphs below.
I also had the intention to go back to Chair Blog | Tumblr to take out scraps and move them into this blog on a regular basis, but I became sort of addicted to Tumblr for a while and didn’t pay much attention to the blog itself.
Then I became more focused on the blog again because I had discovered Quickpress.
On June 12, 2008 I decided to discontinue Chair Blog | Tumblr entirely, still with the aim to fold it back into this blog.
3) Posterous was the next Experiment:
Then in September 2009 I came across Posterous. It was possible to import Chair Blog | Tumblr into Chairblog | Posterous. From then on I was looking into a possibility to import the same content into this blog from Posterous rather than from Tumblr.
The first experiment was creating and downloading an RSS file from my last 20 Posterous posts and uploading them here…strange things happening: Original Photo is now hosted on Posterous. No Titles etcetera. Looking if I can Clipmark the stuff. At least i got the original data…
So this experiment failed entirely and most likely I’m bound to move Tumblr posts manually over here….
4) Clipmark
For a short time I used Clipmark to quickly copy and paste items into the blog.
However Clipmarks has the same principal setbacks as Tumblr and Posterous: It takes the material you copy and paste to their own server. You can’t control them as you would wish to control them. In addition if there is a hiccup with their servers or internet connections you get half empty posts. Moreover when you use Google’s Webmaster help tools like me you are getting errors reported back due to those hiccups.
5) Some disadvantages of Quickpress are now outweighed by Press it
Quickpress has as main disadvantage that you leave the photos that you copy and paste on the sites you copy and paste them from. That has as disadvantage that you are borrowing server time from the site it is published on. Some call that leeching. Others call that hotlinking. As I see several sites doing the same with this site and after I discovered my hosting company changed it policy into charging me for traffic and for the use of disk space this blog is using on their servers, I am starting to find that a bit annoying. I have decided to gradually change all posts so that all content is contained in one place: My hosting companies servers and not spread out all over the internet.
6) Various WordPress and Theme updates later
After experimenting with the Mystery theme for WordPress and various others I put the blog back on the standard WP theme for some time in 2008 and the first half of 2009, after it became too cumbersome to change sizes of published photos each time when there was a change in a theme (at a certain stage I was operating three themes with a theme switcher so that the reader could pick his favorite theme). I also discovered that the blog was getting more and more attention.
My conclusion is that the standard WordPress theme, albeit not so nice for the look and feel of a blog and cumbersome to maintain through various WordPress updates, has certain advances over other themes in the field of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). When I explored further into SEO I decided upon buying the Thesis theme for this blog in May.
Then In October of 2009 all of a sudden I was forced to move the blog from one server to another server at the same hosting company. The clumsy way me doing that proved disastrous. All content ended up one plate with a huge spaghetti mountain of loose ends.
This forces me to manually edit each and every post even before I go further with putting Tumblrd posts back where they belong.
7) From here you can see the Tumblr Java script reproducing some of my Chair Blog | Tumblr posts until I have folded them back into this blog:
8) Another clipping experiment is Kwout:
With Kwout you can clip and paste whole webpages into your blog….
9) Sad Conclusions
I’m bound to manually fold my old Tumblr posts from Chair Blog | Tumblr back and post them here… I’ll be working backward and it will take considerable time for nearly 1,000 posts.
Anyone a better Idea? Please contact page me!
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