I knew that I needed my personal website to not be running Drupal,
since as CMSMS grows, it starts to become a little strange and hard to
explain. Let’s be realistic, if the president of GM was driving a
Prius around, you’d ask questions too.

I’ll be honest, I like Drupal. For the types of sites that it’s made
for, it excels at. Is it for every site? God, no. But nothing is,
including CMSMS.

Did I really want to put my website on CMSMS? Not really. My
personal website is an aggregator. Not only is it a place to post
personal stuff, it’s also a place to gather up all the other things I
do on the internetz, and post them in one convenient location. I have
several blogs I post on plus a lot of images and sometimes even a
video. Sure, I could’ve written modules for CMSMS to do this, but I
really didn’t want to, as I have enough other things to do. I just
wanted something that works.

I admit that I’ve fallen in love with both Posterous and Tumblr over
the last couple of years. They’re both very interesting systems, and
what I find is that they server two completely different purposes.

Tumblr does two things very well. It allows you post different types
of content very quickly. But more important, it’s a true aggregator.
You can put in different RSS feeds and it’ll import those items as
articles. It was very similar to my Drupal setup, to be honest. I
don’t have quite as much control, but I wasn’t concerned about it. I
just wanted those items to show up around any straight Tumblr posts
that I do.

Posterous, on the other hand, is an anti-aggregator. It’s an
intelligent blast service, with a nice display built in. The reason
that Posterous has succeeded where other’s have failed is the ability
to post an item in one place (over email!) and have that item go to 50
different places without doing any work. In my case, I can have it go
to Twitter, Facebook, Vimeo (if I attach a video), Flickr (if I attach
an image), and (most importantly) Tumblr.

So, what did I decide? Strangely enough… both. Officially
http://tedkulp.com is running on my Tumblr blog. However, Posterous
(http://post.tedkulp.com) becomes my delivery platform – my plumbing.
Things I write to Posterous get sent to all the places I need them
to, and are stored safely on my Tumblr blog for future chronological
reference of my future internet dynasty (little overboard? nah!).
And, I still have access to Tumblr proper for me to post little
nuggets/links/comments that really don’t have to blasted to the free
world. Plus, going totally 3rd party/hosted gets me out of any future
religious debates.

It’s a neat system. Though, it probably needs a diagram for it truly
to make sense to anyone except myself. When did having a presence on
the internet become so complicated?