While drinking a super fresh Heady Topper, of course. For a while now I haven’t been that happy with Tumblr as a blogging platform. I think it’s a great community and I’ve met a bunch of truly awesome beer nerds there. While I still plan on remaining active on Tumblr, I’ve been looking for something a little more robust for the large format pictures + long form text that the majority of my posts tend to be.  Some of my gripes with Tumblr:

• No Post Titles – Unless I want to do text posts with embedded images (which I don’t, since then the first images will not show up on the Tumblr mobile app), I have to do an image or image set post which means I no longer get a post title. I have to go into the HTML of each post, change my “title” from “P” tags to “H2” tags.  And then I add a “–” to the beginning of the first paragraph because Tumblr doesn’t actually know that the H2 tag means it’s a title, so it mushes my faux-title into the first paragraph. Actually, it does that even when I do a text post. Might be a theme issue but it’s nothing I feel like troubleshooting.
• Picture Handling –  Since pictures added to the text of a post are limited in size, I host all of my pictures on Google+/Picasa. All pictures below 2048 pixels are free to host there, for life. Hosted images with most themes must have it’s size specified hard coded in the image tag and will not resize for screen size, which means on smaller screens it extend past the edge of the screen. It’s ugly as fuck.
• Lack of Search – Since all of my posts are done in an image caption, none of that text is searchable. If I want to find anything on my site, I have to use Google for it and I REALLY have to diligent about my tags.
• Metadata Sucks – This goes hand in hand with my post title issue. Since Tumblr doesn’t actually know what my post title is, it mushes the first 200 characters of a post as the title metadata for a post, and makes sharing to facebook and other sites look like shit. Also, the way that the theme has all of my Tumblr Likes up top, there are times when it grabs an image from someone else’s site instead of my own for posts.
• Fluid Theme – There are plenty of fluid tumblr themes out there, but for the features I want with a fluid theme, without a ton of custom CSS, and without costing me $49, there isn’t one out there. I’m losing some pixels switching to WordPress (so far) but getting the sidebar with a calendar and a few other widgets I’m looking for I might be happier here.
• Not actually using Tumblr as Tumblr – As I said earlier, I think Tumblr is a great community and since I’ve been using it really as my “website” instead of using it like other Tumblrs, I’m missing out. Not wanting to reblog something that isn’t beer-related, not wanting to share any of my other hobbies, etc etc.

For now, I’m going to be posting here at blog.thefuj.com. Just have to figure out how to get IFTTT to post my WordPress pictures (not just a link to the post, I mean a whole picture, with Post Title and Link to this the post after) to Tumblr/Facebook/Twitter and I’ll be happy. I plan on keeping it that way until I’m satisfied with WordPress as a platform, and then I’ll probably point thefuj.com here and set up tumblr.thefuj.com or something for Tumblr in the future. Until then, you can continue finding my posts over on Tumblr at thefuj.com.