If you’re like me, the last thing you want to hear is someone telling you about some new-fangled Internet thingie that you just have to engage with, now! or you’ll be left behind. Well, I’m here to tell you that Tumblr is different. Look at that face—would I lie to you? Well, anyway… Tumblr is almost comically easy to use, and I say this as an oft-cranky Luddite who is leery of any technical instruction more complex than “press the ON button.” It offers ways to showcase your writing and hone your brand that are extremely efficient and visually pleasing.
Did I mention that it’s easy to use? It will take me longer to describe this than it will take you to do it, but: Go to tumblr.com, sign up, and pick a user name. They’ll ask you to give your blog a title, to follow three blogs at random to start (just pick any three of the suggested—all of this you can return to for fine-tuning later, if you like), and to confirm by email, and you’re ready to start posting.
The dashboard lets you choose, in giant, colorful buttons, what format your post will take: text, photo, quote, link, chat, audio, or video. You click on one of these buttons, upload the content from your desktop using the “BROWSE” button (or just type in your text, if you prefer) and voila! groovy blog post. See? Ridiculously easy.
The secret-weapon part? I don’t even bother with the social-media element; I prefer to think of Tumblr as a super-sleek mobile-content hosting device. Or something like that. With Tumblr, each post that you create has its own URL that you can link to in e-mails, resumes, documents, and so on:
- Example 1: Say I’m pitching an article to an editor via e-mail. I’ll write, “I am myself an architecturally-minded artist,” etc. and then highlight the words “architecturally-minded artist” and embed a link to the Tumblr post of a sketch. All the editor has to do is click on the hyperlink and ching! there’s the sketch—and believe me, they like this a lot better than typing in a web address, or—the horror!—downloading an attachment. (If you are still attaching files to pitches or job applications or anything, really: Stop it.)
- Example 2: I made a tumblr that has one and one post only, a linkable list of my published articles. I can link to this post from anywhere and anyone clicking on it immediately has a sleek-looking Internet Mike Lindgren bibliography.
- Example 3: If you click the “ARCHIVE” button, from any post, you get a very elegantly presented page of thumbnails of all of your posts, which link can then be used as a mobile portfolio.
So that’s my love letter to Tumblr. I think that once you try it, you might even like it. You might even become hooked!