I 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.
Though it might also be worth mentioning that Tumblr is a total pain in the * to use precisely because of that customization. Every dang page is different and I never know what to click. Worse, Tumblr is so slow that every wrong click is an expensive loss of time and patience. On the rare occasion that I find a Tumblr worth following, I just use the RSS feed because the site is too frustrating.
I feel with tumblr it's the combination of gifs and infinite scroll that makes it crap out. It's a far nicer experience appending /mobile/ to a tumblr url.
I think you're missing how a lot of people (I would argue most) are using Tumblr. From what I've seen most content on most pages is not original content, but rather reposting content relating to their blogs theme or whatever they happen to fancy. It's a much more social platform in comparison to WordPress.
Tumblr is a good example of an 'uncontrolled platform'. What started as a beautiful blogging platform, has now turned into a junkyard of cat memes, 'blurr-photo-in-the-background' quotes and animated GIF thumbnails of movie snapshots and softcore pornography. Of course your feed depends on what/who you subscribe to..but due to the nature of Tumblr's platform, even the best blogs sometimes reblog either of the junk above, which makes the platform very painful to use. Sometimes, it takes upto 5 whole minutes to load the entire dashboard. Also tumblr has a terrible UX implementation site-wide (Example - if you want to enable the ability of your followers to answer your post, it's title should end with a question mark, after which a tiny checkbox will pop-up from no-where which you can then click to enable answers.)
In my opinion, $1.1 Billion is a really good deal for a trashcan full of 99% animated cat GIFs and 1% decent content. Rejecting it could be a bad idea as far as I know. Yes Instagram was over-valued, but hey, atleast it didn't come with animated cat GIF's.
I like tumblr - I like that I can point a domain there and essentially get free hosting. Problem is, the system is frequently down. And the way posts are queued to be published is just goofy.
I'll tell you what's wasting bandwidth on Tumblr: Inline CSS -- Every Tumblr page contains at least a kb of CSS in the HEAD section. This CSS is downloaded again for every pageload.
Not to mention that many of the tumblogs use the same theme (same CSS)
Tumblr was the easiest way to setup a simple stream-of-photos blog, so I used it often.
I recently moved all of my "blogs" off of it because visiting one slowed desktop browsers to a crawl, and literally crashed mobile browsers. Dev tools showed a minimum of 20MB transferred when visiting my site, and it quickly ran up to 60+MB if you touched the scrollbar.
That is a lot of prefetching.
Just visiting tumblr.com while not logged in currently transfers 8MB, and displays a content-less landing page.
Using a platform like Tumblr makes a lot of sense, but lots of people still don't do this as evidenced by all the stories on HN that link to overloaded servers.
Love tumblr, love the community, love the design, but god it feels like it's tied together with string.
About two years ago I made the simple request of allowing me to not auto tweet content when posted with bookmarklet (it. would. just. be. a. checkbox.) but it never happened, i think they replied and said they didn't plan it.
there's no importer for wordpress or any other content.
the way you repost stuff is atrocious. i love the concept, but it has no concept of who originally posted it when you quote something, leading to the worlds most horrendous spaghetti of html for you to deal with (eg: http://grab.by/6iqJ)
Tumblr has got all the hard stuff right, and is seemingly failing at the easy technical stuff :(
Well TheOatmeal designed "Tumbeasts" for the Tumblr error pages, so I guess I am not the only one who experienced problems. I might reevaluate, but when I tried it last time (a couple of months ago) there were too many issues to make it usable for non-techies in my opinion. Maybe they rely on Flash? I have a flash blocker...
PHP - sure, it is just that I can not administrate it myself, and Wordpress.com has weird pricing. To fix hosting multiple blogs on debian, I would have to dig into the PHP code, which I would like to avoid.
Maybe these are not serious issues for the mainstream population, but I'll consider it :-/
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.
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