Insomanic: Andy Young's Blog

New website..Tumblr it is

So, I finally got around to setting up a personal website that I’m not ashamed to show people..

I don’t really blog, but I wanted a home to stick links to my Twitter, FB, LinkedIn profiles etc for people that discover me online, collect links to show off when my projects receive press coverage etc as well as post interesting links and other notes from time to time.

Features I wanted:

• Easy setup, hosted solution, no coding required - I’m lazy, didn’t want to spend time on the technical side of a full Wordpress install etc.
• A service with lots of themes so I could find one I liked and do minimal customisations
• The ability to post stuff with tags, so in future I can set up separate index pages for stuff related to GroupSpaces, Selective Twitter Status, entrepreneurship etc
• My own domain name
• Suitable cool post-from-email/iphone/etc support
• All the above for free!

I looked at Posterous first but it doesn’t support all of the above right now. The winner is Tumblr which was quick to set up, does all the above plus the following bonus features:

• Designed for minimal blogging (posting short snippets, links and videos rather than extended blog posts) that suits the way I want to post
• Handy powerful iPhone app for posting
• Supports Markdown - a handy way of entering formatting quickly as you type

I’ve also integrated commenting powered by Disqus, which took only a couple of minutes and has a bunch of powerful features (sign in with Facebook etc). I think the default Disqus interface confuses visitors with too many features and wordy instructions so I’ve hidden some parts of the comments interface and tweaked some other stuff out of the way using custom CSS.

Let’s see how it goes..