mirona, curator

so long tumblr, and no thanks for no fish

It’s been a few months spent on Tumblr, and a very bumpy ride at it. I dreamed and worked hard to use it as an aggregator of various feeds that I otherwise display at the bottom of my main blog’s sidebar. I hoped to provide interested readers with my picks of blogs, links (via Delicious), photos, music and videos displayed in a more friendly manner than here, while not generating collection posts on this blog. FAIL, and I had all Tumblr’s support while at it. They only grab 2 new items per feed, and only in some cases, rendering my curating efforts useless. They got in touch twice, slightly disproportionate to my four emails. They were cheap with their words, I was generous with mine. Was considering sending a fifth email today when I realised it’s simply not worth it. My Tumblr is closed, and my main blog’s sidebar returns to the previous complete feed, aggregated in Google Reader and republished as HTML with FeedBurner.

In the process, I styled a Tumblr template to my liking, introduced categories/ labels, and edited every goddamn post that made it through to add the category, manually. Tumblr doesn’t have a proper dashboard, or anything like a content management system as provided by other blogging platforms. It neither has support, and that for me is the biggest possible flaw of a service today. So Tumblr, my dear, R.I.P. In the course of these months, I also spent half a day trying to generate a reasonable and reliable feed with Yahoo! Pipes. FAIL. Oversized effort for pitiful results, in both cases. I am very saddened by my Tumblr experience, and very sorry for the time invested. Thankfully, it stops here, with a brief account of my woes, as published in my Tumblr sidebar all along the very, very bumpy ride.

My feeds are working badly, showing too few items or none. Here’s what I did to fix it.

May 23rd - 1st email to Tumblr support; only 2 of my 4 Google Reader feeds were showing on the page.

May 26th - 1st answer from Tumblr support.

May 28th - 2nd email to Tumblr support, and their 2nd answer; Marc said: “I’ve passed this along to our development team to investigate”.

June 4th - 3rd email to Tumblr support. No reply.

June 19th - 4th email to Tumblr support, as I started seeing small improvements. No reply.

July 14th - Most Flickr photos stopped showing. Bad.

July 23rd - A Vimeo video appeared in the page. Good.

August 1st - Posts get through randomly if at all. THIS BLOG IS CLOSED.

Update, August 5th 2009: I now see that Tumblr was busy counting pageviews and releasing their large number to the world. That’s fine with me, I’m happy for them, but I still don’t see why someone in the Tumblr support team didn’t come back to my request saying, for example, better feed integration is not a priority for us. It could have saved me, and them, a lot of trouble.