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Why I moved from Posterous to Tumblr…
This blog was with posterous for 2 years now. They are a great publishing platform and the DeskAway blog is still hosted there. Over the weekend I was reading Joel’s blog (BufferApp founder) and started looking at all the stuff that he had on his blog - Social widgets, disqus comments, the slide etc. At first I thought he was on WP. I DM’ed him and he told me that he was on Tumblr.
Ironically, this blog was initially hosted on Tumblr (sometime back in 2008), then moved to WP and then to Posterous.
I checked out Tumblr once again and checked out what they had to offer. I read a few articles that compared Posterous with Tumblr. A few of the top reasons for this move are the following:
1. Javascript: Tumblr’s support for Javascript. This is huge since you can add cool widgets (latest tweet, social icons etc.) to your site.
2. Disqus: since Tumblr supports Javascript, adding the disqus commenting platform was a no-brainer.
3. Themes: Tumblr, by far has much much better themes than Posterous.
I spent a few hours choosing and editing my theme. BTW, Tumblr’s HTML editor rocks. Here is a picture while I was updating some styles:
I used Posterous’s autopost feature to move my blogs overs to Tumblr and then went through each blog post and updated the post date. Once everything was good to go I updated the A Record with my Registrar and waited for a day to have www.sahilparikh.com point to Tumblr.
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Software is important stuff; it keeps the world moving. No car, no television set, not even a modern toaster works without some code. Take corporate computer programs away, and the economy comes to a grinding halt. In some cases software has changed how humans behave; spreadsheet programs, for instance, have redefined more than one job.
— The Economist
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What Startup To Build?
What are your problems? That’s what you should be working on. Businesses are solutions to problems. Solutions come from ideas. Ideas are hypotheses. These hypotheses need to come from a defined problem. Humans have problems.
via techcrunch.com
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Software should be like Zite
Last week, my friend Manish referred me Zite. He told me to go meet her once. I told him that I am currently with someone named Flipboard - she is extremely good looking and I love the way she turns. He still insisted that I go meet Zite atleast once.
By now you already know that I am talking about the two hot social magazines - Flipboard and Zite :)
Today, I am a convert. Zite is truly very intelligent and gets smarter as I spend more time with her. Love the way she just knows what I want.
I have to say that Zite’s functionality and self-learning capabilities beats Flipboard hands-down. Flipboard might have a kick-ass UI but at the end of the day I want intelligence in software. Software should self-learn, know what I like and show me stuff that is relevant to me. I trust Zite to help me fight information overload.Design is extremely important (Zite’s UI needs a bit of work but it doesn’t come in the way of consuming content) but what is more important is the intelligence built into the software. Knowing that it will get better over time (a good viral strategy too!).
Now, if I can let Flipboard know which articles interest me then it would be the best of both worlds - brains as well as beauty.
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Consuming vs. Producing
2012 is going to be a year where we fight information overload. There are too many things floating around on the Web to consume - articles, blog posts, videos, tweets, pictures, slideshows, etc. I have decided that I am going to make ONE big change this coming year:
Drastically minimize the amount of stuff that I read online.
I have realized:
1. Most of the stuff I read just gives me short term gratification.
2. It is easy to forget the contents of the article if it doesn’t relate to your short-term goals/projects. If I am not raising money then do I really need to read about “8 Myths on Fund Raising?”
3. Reading is NOT the same as working. Being on Twitter is a leisure activity rather than being productive. The question to ask is - “Am I doing this at the cost of being productive?”
4. Consuming information leads to procrastination. I have caught myself bribing myself to a half-hour of reading before I start actual work. oops!
5. A lot of articles are repeat articles. KISSMetrics recyle their tweets with similar articles “3 ways to do this…” or “5 SEO tricks…” that make you feel you need to know the all this stuff or else you won’t be able to increase visitors to your site. Bullshit.
I often think about the times before social networks became popular. I think we spent more time on our businesses doing productive things than get distracted by tips that will help you get a million signups for your SaaS business!
Too much of anything is detrimental.
Ask yourself - are you consuming more than you are producing?
