I tried. I really tried. But Tumblr just didn’t meet my blogging needs.

Tumblr was supposed to make my life easier by allowing me to post content quickly. I also wouldn’t have to worry about upgrading any server software, something I worry about with a WordPress self-install. Best of all Tumblr is free.

Where Tumblr failed me

But Tumblr failed me in the simple act of posting when I want to post. I post a photo at least once a week (see GPOMW). This is often a “scheduled post”, meaning it posts on a specific day and time. Also, I often “queue” items that I set to post 3 hours apart. Unfortunately, Tumblr has failed me on both of these types of posts. In fact, it’s happened several times in the past few weeks. Once, Tumblr decided to publish all my posts in the queue. This is, in turn, slammed my Facebook feed. Nobody wants to see 10+ items posted by the same user on their Facebook feed, all within a matter of minutes. Also, at times, I couldn’t do a simple post on demand.

At times, my Tumblr Dashboard takes forever to load. I don’t think it’s my Internet connection, as I am able to get to other sites quickly. P I did a traceroute to Tumblr’s servers and, well, let’s just say I wasn’t receiving good results at the time.

Perhaps they’re going through a growth-spurt issue, acquiring a lot of users and using up so many resources. If that’s the case, they need to correct these issues soon. If it’s just a problem with me, then I guess I just need to live with the fact that Tumblr is not for me - for my blog that is.

I have to say this though: getting my content off of Tumblr and back onto WordPress wasn’t easy. I ended up using the simply elegant Posterous to import my Tumblr account, then I imported from there back to Wordpress.com. Oh, then from there to my WordPress self-install. A lot of work. And you know what? Many of my Tumblr posts don’t have titles, which WordPress doesn’t particularly like. Luckily, I only had to correct fifty posts.

For now, it’s goodbye to Tumblr as my main blogging solution. Sometimes free isn’t the best solution. I may continue to micro-blog, but I won’t devote full blog posts there until things get sorted out.