Weird. I can't remember ever having trouble loading a tumblr blog. I wonder what accounts for our different experiences?
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Startups: Don't Host Your Blog on Tumblr
11–20 of 90 posts
Re: Startups: Don't Host Your Blog on Tumblr
#12We (NodeSocket) are on Posterous; and so far so good. Love the fact that if a post makes the HN front page, we don't have to worry about scaling or downtime. Also, it was super easy to select a theme and modify some basic CSS rules to match our branding and website. Finally, they have some nice nerdy features as well; GitHub Gists and Vimeos automatically converted from a URL to embed.
I used Posterous for our blogs for Mugasha and they were great. Highly recommended if you want to avoid self hosted.
Re: Startups: Don't Host Your Blog on Tumblr
#13Since when is a startup's corporate blog mission-critical? PicPlum's recent blog posts seem to be pretty run-of-the mill ... press mentions, tips, new features, etc. Nothing that (a) would hurt the company if the blog was down or (b) you couldn't simply use your company Facebook page for.
On the other hand, when I'm looking around for a service and I' trying to figure out whether I should spend cash on a company, I do check out the blog. A blog that goes down, in my head, is a service that goes down, even if I know it to be untrue objectively.
Re: Startups: Don't Host Your Blog on Tumblr
#14Since when is a startup's corporate blog mission-critical? PicPlum's recent blog posts seem to be pretty run-of-the mill ... press mentions, tips, new features, etc. Nothing that (a) would hurt the company if the blog was down or (b) you couldn't simply use your company Facebook page for.
I dunno, it's definitely part of their brand. I would sort-of think twice before trusting a company that couldn't even keep a simple blog up-and-running. 3rd parties don't necessarily know or notice that it's hosted by tumblr.
Re: Startups: Don't Host Your Blog on Tumblr
#15A mistake people seem to make is assuming Tumblr is a blogging platform akin to Wordpress.com, it isn't, it's a different beast entirely. The majority of Tumblr is the "community" of ~teenagers sharing pictures and videos and posts, Tumblr revolves around the dashboard not individual blogs. Sure you can host your company blog there, but do tumblr care about the uptime of that vs. the uptime of their dashboard?
Yeah, I've always been surprised that people consider Tumblr as a platform for anything except hosting short posts (pictures/videos/clips/quotes/etc.) The brevity it [to me] encourages (plus the social features it has) places it somewhere closer to the Twitter side of a continuum between Twitter and Wordpress or Blogger. This is mostly in my head, of course, but I just didn't realize others felt differently until somewhat recently.
Re: Startups: Don't Host Your Blog on Tumblr
#16I use google plus along with a simple tool I made for a really simple blog that's hosted on my domain: https://github.com/lylepratt/Plusify
Re: Startups: Don't Host Your Blog on Tumblr
#17I don't see the problem with sticking with Tumblr. What most of the trouble with my Tumblr-powered sites seems to be is the use of Tumblr's Static Media uploader (http://www.tumblr.com/themes/upload_static_file) which is used for js files, external css, images, etc.
Sites (in my experience!) with a lot of these links have way more loading problems. Simple sites that rely more on markup and CSS3 than images and a lot of JavaScript have only dropped out a few times in my experience.
Just my two cents, maybe somebody can comment and verify this.
Re: Startups: Don't Host Your Blog on Tumblr
#18Since when is a startup's corporate blog mission-critical? PicPlum's recent blog posts seem to be pretty run-of-the mill ... press mentions, tips, new features, etc. Nothing that (a) would hurt the company if the blog was down or (b) you couldn't simply use your company Facebook page for.
Agreed, we didn't have anything too interesting in recent past but we're going to start ramping that up. Especially after checking out rand fishkin's presentation about inbound marketing.
+1,000,000 to rand's presentation. Here's the link in case you missed it: http://hackersandfounders.tv/RDmt/rand-fishkin-inbound-marke...
We are big believers in making quality content at Parse as well. Interruption marketing is annoying and not nearly as effective.
Given that, it's pretty crucial for our blog to be up as well. (we're also on jekyll, hosted on our own servers)
Re: Startups: Don't Host Your Blog on Tumblr
#19We recently moved our dev blog (dev.anideo.com) to jekyll + github pages as well, not because of problems with uptime but because gist support is a major pita on Tumblr and we primarily use our blog to post code snippets.
Re: Startups: Don't Host Your Blog on Tumblr
#20We (NodeSocket) are on Posterous; and so far so good. Love the fact that if a post makes the HN front page, we don't have to worry about scaling or downtime. Also, it was super easy to select a theme and modify some basic CSS rules to match our branding and website. Finally, they have some nice nerdy features as well; GitHub Gists and Vimeos automatically converted from a URL to embed.
Another vote for Posterous. I also like the simple customization, and the fact that I can easily add new members/contributors - a nice feature for a company blog.