Edward Gomez (@zemogle) asked why I have moved to Tumblr. He’s recently moved to Wordpress and obviously wonders why I’m jumping ship.

Wordpress is a powerful blogging platform - in fact it is much more than that these days. It is entirely reasonable to run an online shop, a design gallery or company website using Wordpress. Yet for all its amazing features, I was finding Wordpress surprisingly limited recently. I think this is because I don’t want to run any of these powerful websites, I just want to run a blog.

So why Tumblr? In the five years since I started blogging the web has become a richer and faster place. There is far more to see in the way of online video and photos, as well as there being far more websites and website aggregators. Twitter, Facebook and other so-called microblogging platforms make it easy to quickly share a link or a photo. Tumblr positioned itself from the beginning as a mid-ground and has evolved into a niche in the centre.

My habits have changed and Wordpress has become cumbersome. I don’t want to worry about categories and attachments, or about having something in-depth to day about everything I post - something many Wordpress themes require because of the nature of Wordpress’ structure.

So I have finally made the jump from Wordpress. I think Tumblr may better suit my needs for now. It may not last, or I may still be using it in another five years - you can’t tell with the speed things change online.

I’m hoping that Tumblr encourages me to share more. I share a lot of links on my Twitter feed @orbitingfrog and it would be good if some of that was also popping up here.

I still think Wordpress is an excellent platform and have kept the old blog as an archive on http://oldblog.orbitingfrog.com - but now the Tumblr adventure begins. If you have Tumblr tips you’d like to share, I’d love to hear them.