Recently, I’ve found myself turn­ing the cor­ner on two things I used to hate on.

The first is Tumblr.

Well, not fully there yet on this one. I do under­stand the need for microblog­ging. Not all blog­gers want to pub­lish full arti­cles. Hell, my posts are much shorter than my old whole-​day recaps. Not all read­ers want to read all that, either. TL;DR is every­where. But I still want to see some orig­i­nal con­tent. It feels like Tum­blr is an infi­nitely loop­ing night­mare of reblogs. I’ve seen block­quote bars fill more than half the width of my widescreen mon­i­tor. It doesn’t make sense to me that you would need to reblog an entire branch of reblogs just to add “Me, too” at the bot­tom. It’s like Tum­blr set out to recre­ate reply-​to-​all e-​mail con­ver­sa­tions from hell.

Whoa, sorry about that. Like I said, I haven’t com­pletely got­ten over this one. But to get back on track, I do under­stand the need for microblog­ging. You found some­thing cool, and you want to quick share it with all of your friends. That’s great! Make a new blog post, include the cool thing, put a link to the orig­i­nal source (no need for a bread­crumb trail back through a mil­lion peo­ple I don’t know), and add your own take on things at the bot­tom. Done! You can do that on Tum­blr. Or (time for a gra­tu­itous plug for work) you could do it bet­ter on Word­Press. We’ve got more func­tion­al­ity, includ­ing honest-​to-​God built-​in com­ments. We’ve got a huge ecosys­tem of third-​party devel­op­ers mak­ing themes and plug-​ins to do any­thing that you could pos­si­bly want.

You can still microblog, but look a mil­lion times bet­ter doing it. Check out this travel micro-​photo-​blog. Or our P2 theme. Or this AMAZING Tumblr-​on-​crack theme:

(from Theme Foundry. Fol­low the link for a live demo of the theme you can play with.)

(Yes, I’m aware that Shelf is also avail­able as a theme for Tum­blr, but it doesn’t have the func­tion­al­ity of the Word­Press ver­sion.) I’m not even a microblog­ger and I want to use it. If that’s your thing, I encour­age you to con­tinue, no mat­ter what plat­form you are using. But please, broad­cast in your own voice, don’t be an echo of a stranger.