Hungry Blues Gets a Tumblelog

http://hungryblues.net/tumblin (feed)

What's a tumblelog? People often cite kottke's early definition (early as in 2005), in which he says:

A tumblelog is a quick and dirty stream of consciousness ... with minimal commentary, little cross-blog chatter, the barest whiff of a finished published work, almost pure editing ... really just a way to quickly publish the "stuff" that you run across every day on the web.

With much less time to write on Hungry Blues but a lot of time still spent on the web, I've been really drawn to tumblelogging. For the last several weeks, I've hesitated to start, however, because I wanted my tumblelog to have a little more functionality than the most readily available tumblelog implentations—tumblr, a free, hosted tumbling platform, and gelato, which aspires to be the WordPress of tumblelogging software. Mainly I wanted tagging and search, so I can find stuff after I've posted it and collect stuff with particular projects or interests in mind.

So here's what's under the hood of my tumblelog:

• A separate WordPress installation.
• Tumblejack theme to give WordPress that tubmblelog look and feel, with stylized presentation of the 4 main content types (link/text, quote, photo, video). For another WP tumblelog theme definitely check out Matt Herzberger's MH_Tumbler theme.
• Josh Kenzer's recently released Quick Post plugin, which allows me to post the different content types and tag them on the fly, as I surf the web, without ever going into the WordPress back end or a desktop editor.

Aside from a few very small tweaks to the header template, that's pretty much it.

Now that I've got it all up and running I'm totally digging it. I'd sort of like to do something with all that black space to the right of the sleek, narrow tumblelogging column, not sure what though, especially since I want to keep the thing light weight and minimal and not slow it down with a lot of extra blog features. One thing I'd like to see in a future release of Quick Post is the ability to add new tags on the fly, without having to navigate the WP back end.