Superbland
Tumblr?
A few friends of mine have recently started tumblelogs. One person said to me something along the lines of “it’s like twitter meets livejournal”. This didn’t immediately make me want to dive right in and give it a go, but it seemed like fun and i’ve been trying it out for about two weeks now.
What’s it about?
Basically a tumblelog is a form of microblogging, and what people post is generally quite small, for instance a photo with a caption, a quote, a video etc. The point being that people can create posts snappily, without taking too much time over it. People document things they’ve seen that inspire them, that they like or find funny, it depends really.
Customisation
When i started my tumblelog, one of the first things that i wanted to do was to jazz it up a bit and give it a personalised look and feel. The customisation and theming options in tumblr are just brilliant. It’s incredibly easy and flexible. It works by using special tags to render particular elements. A quick example:
{block:Caption}
{Caption}
{/block:Caption}
So this says, wherever you need to render a caption, use this block of code, and place the caption where {Caption} is marked. It was just a case of making a rough template, then retrofitting it with these tags for the dynamic content.
There’s lots of options for custom urls, an api, an iphone app. it’s pretty cool.
Community
One of the things I’m liking about tumblr is the community experience. Once you start to follow a few people, reblog and like their posts and vice versa, there is a quaint and individually enclosed sense of community. You can’t message or talk to people directly, but I’ve started to ‘get’ where people are coming from and what sort of stuff they’re into. It’s interesting.
July 15, 2009 at 2:47 pm // Uncategorized // No comments
