Tumblr - One weeks use

Publish on 16th may

I have been using Tumblr for a little while now and wanted to do a 'proper' review.

The first thing to mention is the ease with which you can set up and start using the service, 5 min max.

Click the 'Read More' for the full article.


After getting you account and being introduced to the various methods of posting you have the option to customise and add bits to your blog.

You have a variety of options when it comes to posting content. the primary method for me has been the 'Share on Tumbr' bookmark which takes you to a web page where you can select the type of media you wish to publish. Once selected the site automatically searched the page you tried to post from presenting you with the available media of that type. For example, if you select photo, you are presented with a box containing all the photo's available on that site to select from. You are then offered the opportunity to add a comment (within the comment box you can add additional links) before posting the item to you tumblr page.

Additionally there is a tumblr IM bot, which I haven't used, and a email address which allows you to post from any email application or any email compatible mobile handset. In addition, if you mobile provider has a MMS to email gateway (as O2 in the UK do) you can post content directly from your mobile via MMS (which is great for me as I have a number of 'free' MMS included in my monthly tariff).

One of the most useful features is the ability to add 'feeds' from your other sites such as Flickr, twitter, del.icio.us etc. This means that any articles (such as this one), tweets or bookmarks show up on my tumblr blog with no intervention on my part.

One of the things that struck me as not as user friendly as Blogger.com is that you don't have as many customizable options for your site. For example, though you can add a twitter feed, which posts your status updates as blog entries, you can't add a twitter widget like the one on this site.

The only real problem I have come across so far is in the posting of video content. Tumblr links with Vimeo to host video content. While this is useful if you ether have no existing video hosting or already have a Vimeo account, it is not as good for those of us who use a different service such as YouTube. When you try to upload video directly to tumblr it adds this video to your Vimeo account, rather than giving you the option of adding it to a youtube account.

This is not a major problem as you can set tumblr up to pull your youtube content through as a feed, thereby placing any video's you post to youtube on your tumblr site. The best solution then is to place any video content to your youtube site and let tumblr cross post it for you.

All in all, I have found that the tumblr site is infinitely easer to keep updated, with much shorter entries, concentrated on individual topics. As such, posting video's or links you have found with short notes and descriptions are much easer and less time consuming than maintaining a full on blog. In addition the ability to aggregate items from other sites makes tumblr a ideal central location for your "web 2.0" content.

Links:
Lifehacker - Tumblr review
Youtube
Tumblr
Vimeo
O2
del.icio.us


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Twitter Extras

Tweetcloud another web service based on twitter which can reveal far to much about you.

Another twitter 'add-on' I have seen recently, but yet to test out is TwitterLocal.

Update:
Just a couple of others:
Twubble - Searches for your friends friends - to help expand your network.
Twits Like Me - Another one to expand your network, searches for people with similar text in their tweets.
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New favorite application

A few days ago I read about Digsby which is (yet another) multi protocol Instant Messaging client. Since receiving my 'beta' activation code I have been using this with AIM, Yahoo, Gtalk and MSN without issue. It also has a 'plugin' for facebook which worked great. The only missing link I have found so far is the lack of direct twitter integration, this can be overcome with the jabba compatible twitter@twitter.com IM bot, which, for me, works great. All in all this looks like a great application and I am looking forward to the mac version.

I am currently testing out the latest version of Flock which so far seams to integrate several services (Facebook, Twitter, Flickr etc) very well (so far). I also found Pocketflock which gives you all the useful Flock functionality from a portable drive.

The 4 hour work week blog has a short but interesting interview with Gina Trapani, founder of Lifehacker.com.
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Lots of Twitterings

It seems Bill Thompson has set off a series of blog posts about twitter and its various uses.

Bills Post

Chris Reed

Broadstuff.com

I haven't integrated many of my 'web services' to twitter, preferring to keep things separate, but for examples of the things you can do see Lifehacker Twitters.

However, I have got twitter updating my Facebook status through twittersync.
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Cli twitter / irssi (IRC)

Command line twitter:

In my continual search for a variety of ways to update twitter (and because the twitterIM client appears to be constantly 'under maintenance')

I found this:

http://binnyva.blogspot.com/2007/03/using-twitter-part-1-command-line.html

Which allows me to update twitter from my Ubuntu ssh login.

Latest IRC client, irssi:

While on a mission to do everything via the command line I have been working on an installation of irssi and bitlbee. It is a simple case of 'apt-get' to install both. I had a bit of trouble with bitlbee but followed the instructions here (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Bitlbee) and installed xinetd (via apt-get again). It took me a little while to work out why it bitlbee wouldn't let me save my setting, then I realised I changed the user name in the ircd file to my name, it need to be left as bitlbee so it can write to the config file! I also left in the bind to localhost as I will only be accessing it from there.

Irssi installed and ran with only one small hitch, it doesn't like my hostname, resulting in a cryptic error message and a refusal to connect to any irc server. To get round this (for some reason it won't keep the changes to the config file hostname = blabla) I created a bash alias which
runs irssi as 'irssi --hostname= ' which clears up the problem. I realise this is a patch rather than a solution, but I'm not proud.

Hopefully helpful links below.

Links:
http://binnyva.blogspot.com/2007/03/using-twitter-part-1-command-line.html
http://www.bitlbee.org/main.php/irchacks_bitlbee.html
http://irssi.org/
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Bitlbee
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Bitlbee/Latest

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An Introduction

So, I have finally got the site set up with my Del.icio.us bookmarks, my Twitter feed and a set of my favorite links. The blog is to be an addition to my personal website and will mostly be a discussion on any technology news of the moment, any updates with my ongoing studies or career or anything to do with my interests in Cyberpsychology. Unfortunately due to my impending Open University assignment deadline I haven't had much time to write the last couple of weeks.

Just to note, I still can't seem to get the TwitterIM to work, is it just me?

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