And here I was, amongst the site moves and coding I was doing today, trying to rearrange my posting system for sites I barely post on. Why? How the hell do I know?
Anyway, I've decided to make a few decisions about what I want and what my goals were. I want three things:
- A place to post articles (like this) about my life, code, my family, whatever. It's generally low traffic. This is a basic blog/home page.
- A place that archives everything that I do online, including posts on other blogs/sites, foursquare, twitter, facebook, etc. This is an activity stream.
- An easy way to take the posts from #1 and post them to various places (twitter, facebook, my archive, etc) without doing any real work.
Previously, I decided to use Posterous for #1 and #3, and Tumblr for #2. The Tumblr page (activity stream) was essentially my home page (http://tedkulp.com). Everything posted to Posterous would get sent to Tumblr, and Tumblr was setup to grab a bunch of rss feeds of my various escapades around the interwebs and post them into one place.
Tumblr is a great site. It really is. It's a great piece of engineering and I totally get why people use it. However, for me, I realize that it's not really what I need. Tumblr is great for social, it's great for reblogging things, it's great for reposting content… especially from other Tumblr blogs. But the fact of the matter is that I don't use those social aspects and really don't reblog a whole lot of stuff. I also don't really use any of the post types that it gives you, because I really don't have the different types of content to throw in there. Honestly, it's just plain overkill for my needs.
Why would I post everything for #1 (and #3) just to get it to Tumblr? It didn't make a lot of sense. Add to the fact that my homepage being an activity stream looked incredibly cluttered, which I wasn't loving. Most people could give a rat's tuchis that I checked in at Wawa on Foursquare or bookmarked some goofy WoW site on Delicious. So why let that overshadow my real content, which is my posts?
The activity stream needed to become a separate site, something that I could get to or link to form my main site, but not clutter up everything with. It's still documented somewhere, but it's not becoming the focus, because let's be honest, it's not terribly interesting to most people.
In the end, I've moved to the following setup, and I think I'm happy with it.
- http://tedkulp.com is now running on my Posterous site. I've picked a happy, light theme and added links to my various things. The only thing that will be here are blog posts about life, and the occasional Instagram picture. That's it. Neat and clutter free.
- My activity stream will now reside on http://archive.tedkulp.com. This is a Drupal 6 site I threw together in about an hour with some very basic modules, a theme I've previously used for another site, and some spit, toothpicks and glue. It will collect my posts from different places (including my Posterous site) in one section, and document the rest of the activity stream cruft (foursquare, facebook, twitter, delicious, etc.) in a side section.