Just in case there’s anyone out there who’s still on the fence about it I decided to go ahead and write the 879th Tumblr vs. Posterous review on the web.
To be honest, the only difference between this review and all the others you might read, is that I wrote this one. That means you have a 100% guarantee that this particular review comes straight from the mind of a man who’s own mother said of him as a child that he was, “too smart for his own good”. Too smart?! Wow, that sounds like a rave review to me.
I’ve been blogging on WordPress for over five years and recommend it as a blogging/CMS platform of choice to clients and friends alike. As I was making the decision to move my personal blog away from WordPress, so I can work less on the behind the scenes development (themes, plugins, upgrades and such) and focus more on the content, Posterous and Tumblr were the two platforms at the top of my list. As much as I love WordPress and building sites with it, I’m not a fan of WordPress.com for some reason.
Since part of my job is being on the cutting edge of technology, I already had Tumblr and Posterous sites set up, so it was just a matter of getting them to a place, aesthetically at least, that I would feel comfortable using one of them as my full-time setup.
Another caveat to my experiment was that each theme had to be basically default themes. It would defeat the purpose if I had to constantly be futzing around with the theme every time a new feature was introduced to the platform. Once I chose the two themes I could live with I started conducting my own little focus group.
If you know me, one thing you know is that I am a sucker for focus groups. I want to hear what people like about a product and why. I want to get inside their heads and know why they’re making tat choice.
Pretty much without exception Tumblr was the favorite as far as looks go. As the saying goes, “you only get one chance to make a first impression”. I’ve said it over and over that it doesn’t matter how good your content is, if someone visits your site and it looks like shit or it’s cluttered and hard to figure out, that may well be the last time that person visits your site.
Right now there are pros and cons to each platform that, depending on what you’re looking for, could sway you either way.
Tumblr:
- I very much like how Tumblr divides your content into the proper category and make it easy for people to immediately see what that content is once you post it.
- I dislike that that other than a “traditional text blog post” entry you can’t create a title. If I upload a gallery of photos I can’t title them, only add captions. Not being able to do that keeps me from having h2 tags on many of my posts and that definitely bothers me.
Posterous:
- I like how Posterous acts as an upside down funnel. It lets you post content and then disseminates it out to Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo etc.
- I dislike the theme choices Posterous has, they all look a little subpar. And although Posterous prides itself on posting via email, they have a web editor, the problem is they need to do a lot of work on making it better and more user friendly.
So there you have it. A little insight on why I decided to make the switch to Tumblr and start focusing more on my content and less on my code. I don’t have to worry about whether or not my site is properly load balanced to handle spikes in traffic. That’s the team at Tumblr’s job.
That’s it, sit back and enjoy. If you have any questions or comments drop me an email or submit a tip at the top of the page.
One of the first things you need to do once you’ve decided that you want to become a kick ass, famous blogger that can change the world with a few keystrokes is to decide what type of platform you your blog to be built on. No matter who you are, or how big or small your audience will be initially, everyone has to make this decision before they begin. 
Yesterday I 
