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Tumblr

And I'm back on Wordpress (partially)

I have spent the last week trying to see if Tumblr could replace my Wordpress blog. This experiment has taught me some interesting things:

  1. The community on Tumblr is amazing.
  2. Tumblr is primarily geared towards sharing shorter thoughts and ideas. Want to throw a picture online. Easy. Share a video. No problem. Compose a more complex post with multiple images and videos. Much harder. Wordpress beats Tumblr hands down for longer posts.
  3. I love the Tumblr dashboard. So much great material scrolls by (assuming you are following the right people).
  4. Many Tumblr sites simply reblog others posts with out adding much original content. This is OK. Tumblr is designed to reblog and share material. Some Tumblblogs remind me of Myspace–endless pages of flashing gifs of talking heads.
  5. Despite optimizing some things, Tumblr sucks at SEO compared to Wordpress (unless you put in a lot of work).

Point #2 is what is giving me problems. It is too hard to create more complex posts compared to the Wordpress workflow I have established. There are also many things that I want to reblog but I don't want them cluttering up my site causing my original content to get lost.

So I have decided to move my "proper" blog back to Wordpress. This is where I will post my thoughts, write articles, and share links to things I find compelling. But I will still cross-post my articles from Wordpress to my Tumblr site1 so my Tumblr followers can conveniently follow what I write from their Dashboards. This also frees me up to reblog things to my hearts content on Tumblr without cluttering up my main site.

I look forward to continuing to develop relationships with my fellow Tumblrites.

  1. Using the Wordpress plugin Tumblrize ↩

How to increase the robustness of a custom domain on Tumblr

The Problem

About a month ago I began to notice that I could not reach Tumblr websites that use a custom domain name1. This became a problem when I decided to move the blog portion of Quantum Pie over to Tumblr and host it on my subdomain blog.quantumpie.com. Not being able to access your own blog from home sucks.

After doing some digging, I came across this informative post by the bảohouse about how to make a Tumblr custom domain more robust. All Tumblr domain names, by default, are routed through a server that is hosted by Rackspace. This is the 72.32.231.8. IP address that Tumblr tells you to point to when setting up a custom domain name. For some reason I could not reach this server from home.

The Solution

There are other servers that Tumblr uses to deal with custom domain names, but it does not publish these publicly. The trick is to let the internet know that these other servers can be used to find your custom domain.

To do this you must create additional A records in your DNS settings that point to your site. Just repeat the standard Tumblr instructions for setting up a custom domain name to create an A record for each of the following IP addresses:

  • 50.22.53.155
  • 50.22.53.157
  • 72.32.231.8 (the default Tumblr IP address)
  • 174.121.98.156
  • 174.121.66.230

It may take a few hours for the changes to take effect.

If you use a custom domain name with Tumblr, you should add these extra records. It will increase the robustness of your website.

  1. My ISP is Teksavvy. I highly recommend them. Much cheaper than many of the alternatives and they offer superior customer support. I am not sure if the fault for this lies with Teksavvy or with Tumblr and a poor server configuration. ↩