My brain has never had this much computer jargon stuffed into it in its whole life.
Today Niall and I decided Morag should start using Tumblr as a platform for her blog instead of Blogger, which feels outdated, overly complicated and clunky. We considered WordPress, but we took a good long look at the HTML we needed to master in order to customize it and eventually said, "Eff this. There's got to be a better way." I'm not really a Tumblr user, but it's gained a considerable reputation and it certainly is dead simple to use. It's also really easy to follow people, like posts, and reblog posts while still maintaining a link to the original poster (super important because Morag will be posting column-like opinion pieces and some old articles, pictures of her family and inspiration for her book, etc).
Her husband Niall and I then went to work making her new Tumblr blog look spic and span. He's a graphic designer, so while he was working his magic making it look all purdy and cohesive with her website, I looked into exporting all her posts from her old blog to her new Tumblr blog.
This didn't turn out to be very difficult. Unfortunately, Morag is one of those artistic types that's all talent and almost no sense of consistency or detail-orientation outside of her creative projects. Things like proper capitalization and paragraph spacing don't matter to her at all. So I went back over the fifty-something posts one by one and edited them so they were readable and looked like they were written by a professional author.
The perfectionist inside of me has learned a lot of deep breathing exercises and soothing mantras lately.
No sooner had I started to do this than Niall informs me that the posts were showing up all over Morag's personal Facebook page and her professional Kate Kerrigan one. Apparently, when we set the Tumblr to publish to Facebook everytime she put up a new post, when I imported all the old ones it re-published (vomited) all of them all over her social media.
We also hooked it up to Twitter. Cue influx of tweets asking what the hell is going on.
Since I'm in charge of her social media, I went through and deleted those rogue posts one by one and apologize to her followers. Oops.
After a lengthy flirtation with Feedburner, I decided I could not get my head around it. Has anyone every used this?? I'd never heard of it before today, but it's supposed to be the ultimate place to store your blog material and followers while you float around from blog platform to blog platform (like moving from Blogger to Tumblr). It is riddled with techy jargon, impossible to navigate, and difficult to search for. I finally decided that if I, an avid internet-user and blog-follower, had never heard of it/could not figure out how to use it, we could not redirect the old Blogspot followers there. They would just have to follower her anew via Tumblr. So that's a few hours in the trash.
Sorry about this rant. I can, however, gladly announce that:
- the Kate Kerrigan blog is officially up and running and looking sharp
- it's part of an efficient web which links you between her website, her Twitter, and her Facebook page
- she, Niall and I can manage all the posts via HootSuite, our HQ site
- I know slightly more than I did about the Internet this morning.
So there's that. Check out my hard work here.
Oh, and while I was fooling around pretending like I knew what I was doing this whole time, I set up a Tumblr site for my blog. Nothing fancy, but if you prefer using Tumblr, you can now follow me at humanpopcorn.tumblr.com.
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