Switching from Wordpress to Tumblr
Zach Waugh •
I had some free time today, so I decided to switch my self-hosted Wordpress blog to Tumblr. I've been thinking about doing it for a while and since I want to try to post more in 2010, it seemed like the perfect time.
My main motivation behind switching is that I've always liked Tumblr, and have never really been a fan of Wordpress. Wordpress is a great product, but for some reason it never really clicked for me. For example, here's a comparison of the Tumblr dashboard vs the Wordpress dashboard:
Tumblr is clean and simple, and Wordpress is a bit overwhelming and has too much going on. I'm not trying to knock Wordpress, it has gotten a lot better in the last few releases, but seems like it's trying to be everything to everyone. Tumblr is much narrower in focus and just feels better to me. On top of that, it actually makes me want to post more, which is a feature you can't underestimate the value of.
As an added bonus, I don't have to worry about upgrading the software if there is a security problem, or worry about traffic spike taking down Wordpress, it's all handled by Tumblr. It also means I don't need MySQL anymore on my Slicehost VPS since the rest of my site is just static content, which is nice for a low-memory plan.
I'm still working out the kinks, but so far I'm pretty happy with it. Unfortunately, there was no easy way to import all my posts from Wordpress, so that had to be done manually. Luckily, I only had about 20 posts, and it didn't take very long. The only thing I wish Tumblr had was a bit more control. For example, you can't change how your archive page looks. Everyone's is the same and it doesn't match your theme, and I don't particularly care for the layout. That and a few other little things bother me, it's not perfect, but it's definitely the best I've found so far.