James Burrage at WebKanix

I’ve been thinking of how I can post pictures, videos and short text snippets from my notebook and mobile phone whilst away. I’d like to use this blog to concentrate on comment on the articles and podcasts and anything else exciting, so it’ll all be personal stuff. Looks like tumblr is the answer.

This also links in with the research I’ve been doing for the blogging episodes of the WebKanix podcast. Should you go with a hosted service like Typepad or WordPress.com, or consider hosting Movable Type or WordPress yourself. I have really mixed feelings at the moment.

My project management is hosted on GoPlan, yet I host all my blogs on hosting I control. I put all my photos on Flickr (as opposed to a gallery here), use Google Analytics and am now really excited about having a Tumblelog to hold the personal stuff. The thing is, I’m not sure whether to go with tumblr (and how to link that in with a domain, or leave it on their domain) or whether to go with gelato cms which I can host.

I think the doubt comes from the content and where it is. If something happened to my Flickr account, I have all my photos anyway and can just upload them somewhere else. I have (very basic) log analysis tools for raw data if I can’t access Analytics, and losing GoPlan wouldn’t be the end of the world. But in two years time (if I post once a day) almost 700 entries of text, quotes, links and other posts might be out of my control if I wanted to put it somewhere else.

At the moment I can’t draw a conclusion. I’ll try out tumblr and gelato over the next fortnight and see which I prefer (if tumblr is good enough for Kevin Rose it should be a no brainer, really). As far as blogs go, I think self-hosted is always best. You can reap the benefits from all those inbound links and even if you use Blogger for the actual authoring, you can have it FTP’d automatically to your site.

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This poorly thought out rambling was posted by me, James Burrage, on Thursday, August 23rd, 2007 at 10:27 am and is filed under Online Tools and Networks. If anyone responds to this post, you can follow them through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.