Which publishing tool should I use for topic-based blogging?

November 18, 2009 11:36 AM

What tool should I use for publishing extended thoughts that I want to link to from Twitter? I'd like something topic-based, with tagging, that lives in the cloud? Does such a thing exist?

I'm a technical writer, and I recently discovered a thriving community of my peers on Twitter (much to my surprise). Now that I've joined the dialog, I find that I often want to say more than I can fit in 140 characters. Obviously I need a blog. I've used various tools (Blogger, WordPress, etc.) for short-lived blogs in the past, so I'm not a complete newbie to the idea.

Basically, I'm wondering what newfangled technologies are out there. I'm not even sure if what I need is a blog. I just want a way to post and organize extended thoughts. I'm starting to use topic-based tools in my technical writing, and I love the idea of building standalone bits of information that can be tagged, sorted, and rearranged. Is there anything like that for "blogging."

posted by diogenes to computers & internet (11 comments total)

I just heard about TypePad's micro blogs today. Maybe that would be useful to you?
posted by runningwithscissors at 11:40 AM on November 18, 2009

Tumblr.com might be good for this kind of thing.
posted by lsemel at 11:51 AM on November 18, 2009

Twitwall is a pretty good solution and integrates nicely. You can write page long posts and then Twitwall posts a shortened link to them. Easy-peasy!

Which reminds me, I need to use my Twitwall more often.
posted by fenriq at 12:01 PM on November 18, 2009

I've used various tools (Blogger, WordPress, etc.) for short-lived blogs in the past, so I'm not a complete newbie to the idea.

Why not go back to Blogger?
posted by Jaltcoh at 12:02 PM on November 18, 2009

Also, Posterous. Easily configured to auto-tweet a link + headline of every blog post you make. And will push to a bunch of other places like Facebook as well.
posted by centerweight at 12:46 PM on November 18, 2009 [1 favorite]

tumblr is good -- I use it for exactly this purpose; twitter is really well integrated into the service. posterous is kind of like tumblr, but you use email as your interface.
posted by bluefly at 12:46 PM on November 18, 2009

Tumblr was my first thought.
posted by Medieval Maven at 12:47 PM on November 18, 2009

I really, really like Tumblr. It's as easy to use as Twitter, it cross-posts to Twitter (and facebook!), you don't have to set anything up, really, you can post pictures, links, text, videos...you can post from an iPhone if you've got one...it's really nice.
posted by leahwrenn at 1:18 PM on November 18, 2009

One other is NotePub. Each new posting includes a checkbox to post a shortened link to Twitter, to Facebook, or both.
posted by yclipse at 1:55 PM on November 18, 2009

I also like Tumblr for this type of thing. I like that it has an RSS Feed that I can feed back to my Google Reader so that anything I post to Tumblr gets fed back into Google Reader as a reminder to look at it one more time. Plus, from within Reader I can star it, tag it, email it, share it to Facebook or other services, etc. which is really nice.

If you want commenting, though, I don't think Tumblr does that (it might now, I use it in such a specific way that I rarely look at the site now and it might have comment capabilities now).

I also like Tumblr's search which works quite well for my meager purposes.

Basically, it fits my personal dataflow very well. And if you have a deft hand at web design you can easily paste your own templates in to Tumblr.
posted by smallerdemon at 2:39 PM on November 18, 2009

If you want commenting, though, I don't think Tumblr does that (it might now, I use it in such a specific way that I rarely look at the site now and it might have comment capabilities now).

Tumblr has no built-in comments function, but you can add this through a third party such as Disqus. Unfortunately, I've found Disqus to be extremely buggy.

I use Tumblr and Blogger. I've found that Blogger does almost everything Tumblr does, and Tumblr falls far short of doing everything Blogger does. The main advantages I see to Tumblr are: (1) there are some cool Tumblr templates, and (2) it has an awesome widget that automatically grabs and formats stuff from other webpages to quickly turn them into blog posts. Their lack of features is supposed to be an asset because it gives a "stripped-down" feel ... but if you start actually wanting those features, it can just make it unwieldy. For instance, you can add tags, but I'm pretty sure you need to use a third party if you want to have a convenient list of all your tags.
posted by Jaltcoh at 3:00 PM on November 18, 2009