I had some free time today, so I decided to switch my self-hosted Wordpress blog to Tumblr. I’ve been thinking about doing it for a while and since I want to try to post more in 2010, it seemed like the perfect time.

My main motivation behind switching is that I’ve always liked Tumblr, and have never really been a fan of Wordpress. Wordpress is a great product, but for some reason it never really clicked for me. For example, here’s a comparison of the Tumblr dashboard vs the Wordpress dashboard:


Tumblr is clean and simple, and Wordpress is a bit overwhelming and has too much going on. I’m not trying to knock Wordpress, it has gotten a lot better in the last few releases, but seems like it’s trying to be everything to everyone. Tumblr is much narrower in focus and just feels better to me. On top of that, it actually makes me want to post more, which is a feature you can’t underestimate the value of.

As an added bonus, I don’t have to worry about upgrading the software if there is a security problem, or worry about traffic spike taking down Wordpress, it’s all handled by Tumblr. It also means I don’t need MySQL anymore on my Slicehost VPS since the rest of my site is just static content, which is nice for a low-memory plan.

I’m still working out the kinks, but so far I’m pretty happy with it. Unfortunately, there was no easy way to import all my posts from Wordpress, so that had to be done manually. Luckily, I only had about 20 posts, and it didn’t take very long. The only thing I wish Tumblr had was a bit more control. For example, you can’t change how your archive page looks. Everyone’s is the same and it doesn’t match your theme, and I don’t particularly care for the layout. That and a few other little things bother me, it’s not perfect, but it’s definitely the best I’ve found so far.

I don’t really see the usefulness in viewing blog archives by month or year. I’m not particulary interested in what someone wrote in November 2008. If I’m looking at your blog, I care what you write about, not when¹. I’m not sure why so many blogging systems make a monthly display the default for archives, when a list of the posts is much more usable.

Fortunately, this is really easy to accomplish with WordPress. Take a look at my archives page for an example.. Since writing this I’ve moved my blog from Wordpress to Tumblr and that page is no longer live. Here’s a screenshot of what this page looked like- This list all the posts I’ve written from newest to oldest. Someone can instantly took a look and see if there is something they want to read.

To create an archives page, create a new “Page”, and set the template to “Archives” (see image). This should appear automatically in the dropdown, if it doesn’t, create an archives.php file in your current theme, and make sure there is a header like this:

<?php
/*
Template Name: Archives
*/
?>

Once you save that page, if you’re using the default WordPress archives.php, it will list “Archives by Month” and “Archives by Subject”. Edit the archives.php file, remove those sections, and add the following code:

<? $posts = get_posts('numberposts=-1');
  foreach ($posts as $post) :
     setup_postdata($post);
  ?>
    <div class="post" id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>">
      <h2><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permalink to <?php the_title_attribute(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2>
      <p class="date_comments"><?php the_time('M j, Y'); ?> - <?php comments_number('0 Comments', '1 Comment', '% Comments', 'comments_count'); ?></p>
    </div>
<? endforeach; ?>

Of course, you’ll want to adjust this for your own site as this formatting is specific to my site. Now you have a nice, useful page with all your posts clearly displayed. I’m a proponent of this view even if you have a couple hundred posts, I’d still like to be able to see everything in one shot.

¹ Of course I actually do care when it was written, especially if it’s technology related. If it was written in 2001, it may be obsolete, but I’m not going to find content based on date.

No Format is a plugin to prevent wordpress from applying any formatting to your posts. I got tired of wordpress formatting my carefully crafted HTML and messing up my posts, so I created this incredibly simple plugin to prevent it. It disables two of the filters wordpress passes your post through before displaying it. If you’re posting using the code editor (as I am), these filters can really wreak some havoc on your code.

You can download the plugin here. To install, just unzip and copy to your plugins directory, then activate in the admin.