1FPS|by David Chartier

Yea, it’s that time again. I’m trying to simplify my life, and WordPress is just not a fit for my blogging anymore. I want to post more and more interesting things, and I’ve found Tumblr to be a much better tool for doing this. The company has some great ideas about how blogging should work, and I’ve found that I’m a lot more interested in actually writing and posting things I find with Tumblr.

This should be my last post here at the 1FPS blog, though I’ll leave it running indefinitely so traffic can still get to where it’s going. To ease the move, I’ve tried to keep the new URL and feed redirection as simple as possible. I’m switching all the tech, culture, software, and tips blogging that I have previously been doing here to my Tumblr blog at blog.davidchartier.com, with a new feed at feeds.feedburner.com/davetumbled. I can redirect the old WordPress feed to the new one for a while, but eventually you’ll need to manually update yourself. If you know a better of doing this to make it easier for RSS subscribers, please let me know.

As always, thanks for reading, and sorry about all the commotion as of late. Life’s getting more complicated, but Tumblr should help me keep my blogging simple and (somewhat) steady.

Matthew Buchanan has improved upon an iPhone UI for Tumblr blogs that Tumblr Hacks developed. Now, you can redirect your visitors to http://tumblephone.com/<username>/ and they’ll see your tumblelog rendered like mine looks below:

Tumblr offers its own built-in, generic mobile view for blogs by default, but this of course plays much better on iPhones.

Not doing anything to help my blognundrum, I just stumbled across an appetizing new iPhone app this evening called Tumble. Yes, that light tingling feeling somewhere in the back of your head is right: this is an (unofficial) app for posting to a Tumblr blog, sans audio and video posts for obvious reasons. It’s free, and I’ll be trying it out soon.

I’ve posted thoughts about a blognundrum I consider myself to be stuck in over at my Tumblr blog, sometimes also referred to as my linkblog. Mind sharing your thoughts on my predicament over there?

From Technosailor’s 10 things you need to know about WordPress 2.6, a new “Press This” bookmarklet will arrive that makes it much easier to blog photos, quotes, and videos you find around the web. This is one of Tumblr’s killer features, and it’s about damn time WordPress tackles something like this.

The other 10 things are certainly worth reading, including a new compromise to the ridiculous disabling of external blog editor access (by default) that MarsEdit developer Daniel Jalkut rightfully called BS on.

I’m a huge fan of Brett Terpstra’s MoodBlast, a small Mac OS X Menu Bar utility that allows you to post your thoughts or status to Twitter, Jaiku, Facebook, and Tumblr, as well as your choice of iChat, Adium, or Skype. It’s a killer donationware utility that I use daily and I think I’ve donated multiple times for, but it has a couple of shortcomings. The first is that I can’t use it if I’m away from my Mac. The second is that it doesn’t do Pownce (for now), a Twitter-like service that lets people share more things like events, links, and even files. Truth be told, I’m a bigger fan of Pownce’s features and UI (and the fact that we aren’t limited to 140 characters because Pownce left out SMS support in favor of a mobile/iPhone-optimized site) than I am of Twitter’s, but Twitter is really where the community is at right now, so I’m stuck with hanging out at both.

But I digress; back to trying to get one’s social status/microblogging groove on at multiple sites. If you need support for Pownce and other services, or you’re on Windows and can’t experience the wonders of MoodBlast, Hellotxt is a great new option for posting to all the major services, and then some. Hellotxt does Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Facebook, Plaxo, Tumblr, Meemi, Beemood, GoZub, and Frazr, and it even supports some of the custom features of these services like a subject for Tumblr or tags for Meemi (which I’ve never personally used). Signup is simple, though you do have to hand over your credentials for each service in order to save them and make Hellotxt worth using.

Overall Hellotxt’s UI is nice and simple, though as far as I can tell, it doesn’t offer a version for mobile devices. This is a huge mistake in my opinion; I think the development team should’ve made a mobile site a necessity for going beta or public, whichever came first. Still, it’s a really handy site that makes it easy to post to all these communities, though I don’t see much of a revenue model in its future besides some kind of advertising or possibly inexpensive monthly subscriptions from users. While those subscriptions probably won’t get very far with most users, you can bet that anyone with a product or service to advertise would love to be able to reach all these communities with a simple tool like Hellotxt.

I love Twitter. The concept’s great, and I’m pretty darn active on it, but I’m not so sure Twitter can be lumped into the micro-blogging category with services like Tumblr and even Jaiku. Twitter’s own tag line/motto says nothing about blogging; it simply asks “What are you doing?”

Blogging is defined a lot of different ways by a lot of different people, but one of its fundamental building blocks is conversation. Blogging, at its heart, is a discussion on the web, and this practice is facilitated by things like comments (which are built into virtually any blogging platform and service) and tools like Technorati that help you track what other bloggers are saying about a topic and even your specific blog posts.

I don’t think Twitter can be considered a micro-blogging tool because it doesn’t do comments and, let’s face it, 140 characters just isn’t enough for most discussions. While I’m at it, Tumblr should probably get booted out of the micro-blogging category as well, primarily for its similar lack of comments.
Ultimately, is a label really that important? Maybe, maybe not, at least for now. But sooner or later someone is going to try and figure exactly where all this crazy stuff is going (does Twitter have a business model yet?), and categorizing it all will help us have - yep, you guessed it - a real conversation about what this is all about.

Yesterday I introduced a vanity site that used Tumblr to aggregate everything I publish across the web. The only problem with the way I had set this all up is that my stand-alone Tumblr blog had no room to breathe; it contained my Tumblr posts and stuff from all the other sites I write for. Woops.

Today I fixed the problem, but you shouldn’t have to change any of your settings or subscriptions. DavidChartier.com is still the über-aggregate site for everything I’m publishing across the web, but now my stand-alone dcharti.tumblr.com blog can stand on its own. Reading or subscribing to DavidChartier.com will still get you all my posts on TUAW, Download Squad, 1FPS, My personal Vox blog, Tumblr and my Flickr feed, but now you can visit or subscribe to just my Tumblr site on its own. The best of both worlds: everything in its place, but also everything in one place, all at the same time.

As always, thanks a million for reading.

A while ago I created an RSS feed of myself with Blogdigger, attempting to collect all of the publishing I do across the web as a sort of vanity project for the one or two readers who actually might want all that stuff in one place.

This endeavor had two major faults:

• I thought that each blogger at TUAW and DLS had their own RSS feeds; this is not true. Only the main page and individual categories have feeds.
• RSS is great, but most surfers are still viewing good ol’ fashioned HTML pages in one browser or another.

Thus, I embarked on an aggregation adventure involving Yahoo! Pipes and the fantastic new Tumblr, which just introduced the ability to pull in multiple RSS feeds. These two handy tools solved both of my problems: with a couple of Yahoo! pipes that filter out just my posts at TUAW and DLS, I now have one simple HTML website that aggregates everything I publish from across the web, and cranks out its own RSS feed for the newsreading nerds in the crowd.

So, without further adieu, I gladly present DavidChartiér.com, a Tumblr-powered blog that collects my posts from TUAW, Download Squad, my Vox blog, my posts here at 1FPS and my Flickr photos. Tumblr’s simple bookmarklet also allows me to easily link all the neat stuff I come across that might not fit at any of these other sites.

Now this is by no means meant to replace any of my work at the various sites I write for, and you can tell from how I set up the feed aggregation. Save for the Flickr feed, no full posts are collected - only screenshots and snippets. This way, DavidChartiér.com functions as more of a springboard to these other sites, as opposed to a replacement.

A vanity project for sure, but I I hope at least a few of you can get some use out of it. Enjoy.

“Uh oh, thanks to the likes of Leo and Merlin, I just discovered Tumblr. Love the concept; it’s like a well-featured linkblog + streamofconsciousblog. Though something tells me that latter term might not catch on with the kiddies.”

Is it weird that I quoted myself? Either way, I just opened a Tumblr account, and I really dig the concept. Nice features, good web integration and a powerful bookmarklet provided straight out the gate (thank you!). It isn’t really a replacement for Twitter, but it does a wonderful job of filling the hole between blogging, IM and Twitter.