Tumblr has asserted itself as one of the most popular and dynamic social media sites on the Internet. Even though it is technically a blogging platform, it blends some of the best features of social media with some of the best features of blogging. WordPress remains one of the dominant platforms on the Internet. Unlike Tumblr, however, WordPress hasn’t actually managed to make using the platform into such a distinctive activity that it has created its own gerund. Tumblogging, the term for adding content to Tumblr blogs, however, is coming to the WordPress platform.
How it Works
Tumblogging refers to the way people post content on Tumblr. The Tumblr platform is set up so that it’s very easy to use in terms of posting multimedia content and short blog posts. The platform is accessible from mobile devices and from standard desktop computers, which allows people to post content on the fly, as it is happening or to make more considered posts along the lines of what you might see on a typical blog.
On Tumblr, users are also able to repost content from other people’s blogs and to tag content. This makes finding content easy.
WordPress is famously easy to use, and the themes developed for this particular content management system are oftentimes what make it so easy to use. A whole series of themes have been developed around the concept of making it possible to Tumblog on the WordPress platform. These encourage the same short snippets of information, pictures, multimedia content and so forth that have become so popular on the Tumblr platform.
With these themes, the difference between how a WordPress theme looks and how it’s content is presented and how a Tumblr theme looks and how it’s content presented can be quite negligible. A great deal of the difference comes down to the network on which the blogger is trying to reach out to their audience. If you're using <a href="http://themefuse.com">premium WordPress themes </a>, they may have additional documentation that provides you with instructions as to how to use their specialized features.
Tumblr
Tumblr essentially provides users with everything they need to get set up and running with their own blog without requiring them to do any heavy lifting. The sign-up process is no more difficult than signing up for most free email accounts or other web services.
Tumblr users can choose from a variety of different themes that they can apply to their pages, which control the presentation of the content. This allows users to optimize their blog’s theme to present the type of content that they are most likely to post in the most attractive way possible.
Tumblr charges nothing for putting up a blog on their service. Users are given a URL in the format Site.Tumblr.com, which may not be quite as good for search engine optimization purposes as having one’s own domain, but which still does network the blog in question in with one of the biggest websites going.
For users, the principal downside to this platform is the fact that they have very little control over the website itself. The content is displayed, stored, and hosted by Tumblr. In exchange for the free hosting, the user has no real control over what they put up on the Internet. Even though Tumblr has been very hands-off with the content that people post, there’s no real guarantee that a user, for example, would be able to recover all of the work they put into their Tumblr blog if the site were to disappear.
WordPress
WordPress is a very easy-to-use platform, but it does require that the user has their own web space to get it set up and running. WordPress.com does provide hosting, and a WordPress blog can be hosted on just about any web hosting service out there, many of which already have the platform integrated into their servers, requiring nothing more than going through a wizard to set it up for users.
WordPress remains very dominant on the Internet, but it lacks some of the social networking features that people tend to gravitate towards on Tumblr. In addition to this, WordPress users are required to take care of their website, maintain their content management system installation and do all of the other web hosting tasks that go along with being a webmaster on their own.
Every blogger is looking for viewers. If you happen to get a lot of viewers on Tumblr, you’re not responsible for the extra load on their servers. The same is not true if you happen to be running a WordPress blog. If your WordPress blog should become one of the most popular destinations on the Internet, you’re going to find yourself exceeding bandwidth limitations and having to make accommodations for that heavy traffic.
With tumblogging features integrated into a WordPress theme, WordPress users can get the basic experience and basic look of Tumblr. Tumblr, however, has carved out a niche for itself among users who do not want to go through the process of maintaining their own website.
About author
Anny Solway is a dedicated writer at ThemeFuse – a web studio that creates original WordPress templates, that can be used out of the box. She loves to share blogging and technology tips.
