Adii Rockstar

I’ve been enjoying my tumbling content on here ever since I switched to this design (which is built on a standalone install of WordPress) late last year. To be honest though, considering that I was situated alone on my own island, my tumblog content was never gonna have the same traction as it would have in a community like Tumblr.

So I’ve been considering switching this design over to Tumblr and then just keeping my longer written articles on here (eg. all of my Project 52 contributions) and in the past week I actually ported this design over to Tumblr (the design is too awesome to lose imo). But if you’re reading this, then you’re still reading it on WordPress and not Tumblr…

Before I get into the reasons for not switching to Tumblr, I’d just like to tell you why I was even considering switching:

• There’s a community on Tumblr, which makes the sharing & distribution of one’s content much, much easier. The re-blog functionality is especially awesome and it is also something that I can’t replicate on a standalone version of WordPress.
• Even though I’ve replicated most of Tumblr’s posting functionality in my WordPress environment (something that we’ll also be implementing at WooThemes soon), it is still not as easy and quick to update my tumblog as it would be on Tumblr.

So why didn’t I switch then? Basically I found that I was being limited in terms of porting this design over in its current state. Tumblr has some awesome template tags, but they’re not as flexible as WordPress is, which is a shame. For most people considering Tumblr though, this wouldn’t be an issue, because they could design around those apparent limitations. For me, it has meant that I will continue to tumble on my lonely island over here.

For the last two and a half weeks, I’ve had basically no access to either my Macbook Pro or the interwebs, which meant that the only way I could collect some of my thoughts & ideas was with old-school pen & paper. Fortunately though, my new fetish is my Field Notes notebooks, which meant that I actually did quite a bit of writing during my time offline.

The one thing that I spent quite a bit of time on, was the goals that I wanted to achieve and the ideas that I wanted to pursue this year. But instead of just jotting down a list of things to do in 2010, I spent a little more time to figure out my reasoning behind all of those goals. This meant identifying the spheres of my life where I needed to set goals, and more importantly – why I needed or wanted to set myself those goals.

After spending a few hours figuring out the “why’s”, then jotting down some goals and then working back again to delve into the “why’s”; I realized that there was an ever-present hint of idealism within my writing & thought processes. This was evident within the slight vagueness of my goals (in the past I’d set easily measurable goals to “track my progress” instead), and perhaps also the seemingly supernatural powers it would take to achieve some of those. (more…)