October Thoughts

A Response to Anhvn and Faiz #

I love making websites with 11ty because it’s so similar to Tumblr. My opinion on Tumblr is I don’t know if different is the right word but,something else because of my retail background.

I joined Tumblr when it was getting large. And like Faiz I too tried to get my themes to be premium. This theme specifically, but unlike Faiz, I wasn’t successfull.

Part of my problem was I undervalued my skills from the get go. I made all my themes free and I refused to learn marketing and tbh, wasn’t very social on the Tumblr sphere. I also massively sucked at responding to user questions.

Reasons why Tumblr was Good: #

• You could connect your theme to Github and it would update automatically whenever you updated the github file.
• The documentation was great. Especially for a newbie like me who needed a lot of hand holding.
• Like Ahnvn stated, results were immediate.

Now #

• NPF is a bit confusing. And a lot of classes have changed because of it. This makes styling themes a bit of a pain to hunt down the correct classes (restyling music blocks took forever)
• The theme preview glitches
• Boolean, drop downs and custom photo selections sometimes don’t register. This is annoying because I prefer giving people choices.
• The theme garden still sucks. It features a lot of garbage (by this I mean themes that aren’t even themes-they’re literally slideshows with no code, or multiple plagarized themes).

The thing is, I’m not actually sure if Tumblr is profitable. Tech Crunch doesn’t think so. Similar to me, Tumblr didn’t really charge for its service. And now it can’t. The user base (me included, I am definitely part of the problem) will not pay for Tumblr premium. I mean I’m sure there are people who do, but how many? My guess is less than 10%. Sure users buy checkmarks, crabs etc (and it looks like Tumblr even has a merch store!) but how much revenue does those initiatives make?

I’m not sure response is the right thing to call this. This is not an attack on eithr Faiz or Anhvn. These are just my thoughts after reading their posts.

Scattered thoughts #

I wonder if read.cv is the new Tumblr. I know it’s supposed to be more lit Peerlist or Polywork but those sites are serious (and boring and remind me of my day job). Read.cv is fun and also stuffed with inspiration. There’s parts of the internet that really want to be fun again. I’m thinking:

• mm page
• Straw Page

Website semi-redesign #

Got imspired by Gregory Gunderson, readcv and ofcourse, Marius Masalar.

I made this design simpler because I fuss too much about the way it looks.

I want to try being more loose with this place. Write more meaningful garbage. I need to get rid of friction.

2 ways to do this is to care less about how it looks and also to make writing easier.

I’m going to try the online version of VSCode and see if I can make that my main driver. Not sure how that will effect the main branch though. I guess we’ll see.