Friday, 12 June 2009

New online stuff

You’ll be forgiven for TLDR’ing this entry cause it’s quite long.

Took the day off work today to chill out a bit and have been very glad of it. This morning D3-3Nasked on twitter: “what is this tumblr.com stuff???”. I’d been wondering about that myself so, seeing as I have the day free, decided to investigate. With this kind of thing I tend to find that reading about the service seldom actually helps me understand what it’s supposed to do, or more importantly what I can do with it, and it’s generally easier to just sign up and dick about with the settings till you find out what it can and can’t do. Off I went to tumblr to sign up, but was aghast to discover someone had already registered mogfather.tumblr.com. Arses.

Then it occurred to me – maybe I registered it and forgot about it. The password reset page asks for an email address, not many it can be, so within a few minutes I discover it was me that registered it, and never used it, and we are now logged in and good to go. So I have a play around with the settings and find it’s really just a blog, but with an interesting interface. One thing it does have though is facility to park a domain on it, so you can register your domain then park in on tumblr and effectively have your tumblr page as your website.

blogger offers a similar setup, but it’s rather more complicated – firstly you can’t par a domain on blogger – only a subdomain. Presumably blogger don’t want you to have your blog as your main site. It does allow you to use the www. subdomain, but this means that if someone just enters the domain without the www then the site won’t display, unless you set up some kind of domain forwarding, which is an unnecessary pain in the arse. Also the DNS for blogger is a bit fail in that you have to point the cname at ghs.google.com, whereas tumblr allows you to actually set the A-record to point to tumblr, so if you go to the site either with or without the www it will display fine.

Tumblr also allows you to upload mp3 files (though only one a day, bizarrely) and then it puts a little player on the blog entry. Interesting idea, not sure how much use it will be, but a nice idea for maybe posting your song of the day, which people can then subscribe to. There are various other media types you can upload, some of which (quote and chat) I’m not yet sure of the point of as surely text would do the same. I guess I’ll find out next time I want to quote something. The upload options look like this:

image

On the video section you can either use a URL for a video that’s already hosted elsewhere (a similar setting on audio allows you to bypass the one mp3 a day rule, provided it’s hosted elsewhere), or you can upload a video, though it does require signing up to a new service to do that – tumblr don’t host the video themselves, but rather they’re hosted on Vimeo so you have to log into Vimeo to post it. Not too much of a problem, but it strikes me that if you have a Vimeo account you’d have uploaded the video there anyway and so would just use the URL of that upload on Vimeo, thus rendering the upload option a bit pointless as far as I can see.

One nice feature is the RSS option. I’m a sucker for RSS because I personally think it’s the future and can’t understand why hardly anyone uses it, so anything which uses feeds in a new or interesting way instantly has my attention. I’ve been quite pleased with the twitterfeed setup which allows you to setup a bot to automatically check specified RSS feeds and update your twitter status when a new entry is published. I’ve used it for tweeting when I have a new blog entry (though not this one as I have a new toy to try for that – see further down), but there really isn’t any limit to what you could use it for as you don’t actually have to own the RSS feed in order to tweet it.

Anyway, back to the point, tumblr allows you to do a similar thing to twitter feed in that you give the details of up to 5 RSS feeds and it will update your tumblr each time the relevant feeds are updated, so I could for examle use it as an amalgamator of my various blogs – I have several different ones for different subjects, but it could be useful to have a central point where all the updates can been seen in one place. Add to this the fact that there are various tumblr plug-ins which allow you to embed a tumblr feed on a webpage, so you could even use tumblr as a conduit to collect and collate various information and then post it on your actual website, without viewers ever having to visit your tumblr page.

All this is for the most part redundant and pointless, but I love the fact that it’s possible, and for anyone wanting to promote themselves on the internet could save themselves a lot of troublesome duplication by using services like these. While retarded geeks like me sign up for pretty much any- and everything going, the vast majority of people only sign up for at most 3 or 4 inline services or social notworking sites, so how do you get your product/artist seen by everyone? Well this kind of setup could be just the thing, so you just update one blog or site, and have numerous feeds readers ready to automatically re-broadcast it to countless other services so it gets seen by all the world and his dog. One step closer to, as Dirk Gently (né Svlad Cjelli) called it “the fundamental interconnectedness of all things”, which would I think, make Douglas Adams very happy. I was recently pleased to see that I’m not the only person who wishes DNA had survived long enough to be the best twitterer ever – more here.

So I guess the conclusion is that tumblr looks like it might be quite cool, given more time to work out what everything does. This blog also signifies two tests – firstly I’m trying a new twtter updater in windows live writer, which should automatically update my twitter feed when I post this, and also the RSS feed on tumblr, which should also update after I post. Have a look here if you want to see whether it worked.

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