I’ve shifted “Things You’ll Find Interesting” to Tumblr (here’s why)

By chuq | Published February 4, 2013

I have been investigating ways to improve the Things you’ll find interesting links that I’ve been posting for a while, and I’ve finally pulled the trigger on a big change.

They’re now hosted on on Tumblr. Doing this has a number of advantages:

  • It puts moves this info to a stable platform. What I was using on the back end was a bit of a hack with limited features.
  • It gives me more of a capability to comment on the links — to do some extra curation and create some context for why I thought you’d find this interesting.

For you, it creates options to enjoy this buffet table of information. You can:

  • Continue to read Things You Find Interesting here on the blog nightly, but you’ll lose out on most of the curation since the feed won’t carry it over. I’m actually considering canceling this, as I think it’s the least effective way to follow this content, IMHO. But I do think it’s useful for linking the two sites with each other in the eyes of the Great Google, so for now, I’m leaving the daily digest in place.
  • Go and visit Chuq Snarks on Tumblr and read it there. In all its Tumblr Glory.
  • Subscribe to the Chuq Snarks RSS Feed and read it via your favorite RSS reader.
  • Tumblr will post entries to my twitter feed, so you can pick them up there. This, actually, is my preferred way to watch this kind of microblog, because if I’m busy and I miss a few links, the universe isn’t likely to notice (and neither will I. And I promise, if you miss a few links, I won’t hate you…)

I’ve been mulling over how to improve this for a while — the runner up technology was a WordPress blog themed with P2 but the more I looked at Tumblr, the more I felt it was a good base platform and something I wanted to experiment with. The other option — building my own back end — was more work than it deserved right now (but always tempting anyway).

I still think there’s a lot of possibility to be found in linking systems like this; the problem of this kind of information being seen for a couple of days only to disappear into the back end and basically never being seen again is still unsolved, and I think there is a lot of opportunity to make this information more useful if only the discoverability problem can be solved (emphasis on “if only”, and the phrase “famous last words” come to mind).

The content flowing through Chuq Snarks is going to change and expand in a few ways. It is, basically, my home for linking to interesting stuff and commenting on things where I don’t think a full blog post is needed — I’m setting the limit to 1 paragraph or less. If I want to say more than that, I’ll put it here on the main blog. The reason to keep these separate is simply one of clutter; I don’t want the main blog to be filled up with dozens of “minor” pieces that make people not want to follow it or see the less frequent “major” blog posts. So, long form here, short form there. If you want to read it all, you can subscribe to both. If you want to avoid the chatter of lots of “minor” pieces, then ignore the Tumblr with my blessing. “short form blogging” is definitely something that not everyone appreciates, and I’ve tried to be sensitive to that all along.

It should also be noted that implied in the name of the Tumblr blog is that my commentary over there may be a bit more — pointed — than I’ve typically done here on the main blog. What that is going to ultimately mean is still a work in progress, and probably always will be…

Enjoy. And feel free to point interesting stuff in my direction or let me know what you think about what I’m posting…

 

Related posts:

  1. Curated Thoughts on Curation
  2. Things You’ll Find Interesting July 6, 2012
  3. Things You’ll Find Interesting December 31, 2012
  4. high-volume email…
  5. Things You’ll Find Interesting May 20, 2012
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  • William Sommers

    I for one enjoy and appreciate the simple list format here. While I first enjoyed reading your words in all their natural wordiness back in mid-80s comp.sys.mac.*, these days I simply don’t have the time and/or patience and/or simply the inclination to parse through commentary. It’s not you; it’s me. Really.

    A link’s title may grab. The material may engage. If engaged, I may seek out commentary. It’s the order that works best for me, the order that helps keep the personal consuming/producing ratio in balance.

    • http://www.chuqui.com chuqui

      I both like and dislike the “simple list” format. it’s simple. It’s succinct. It completely lacks any context. If “Things you’ll find interesting” is about me sharing stuff, the lack of context about what’s interesting about a link or why I find it interesting bothers me. It might as well be a semi-random set of links.

      So I’ve been looking for ways to add context to the list. In a perfect world, this information would be available in different flavors via different channels to match everyone’s preferences. To do that would require building a custom CMS to manage and distribute the data. Which I can. Which I’ve kinda designed. But for right now,it’s just more work than I want to commit to, both development and maintenance. But maybe someday.

  • Andy

    Thank you for sharing your thinking on this.

    The Chuq Snarks links on Twitter are probably my *least* favorite way of receiving interesting links, and I’ve been pondering whether to say something because it’s been driving me nuts. Precisely *because* the commentary on the Tumblr is so brief — and especially when there’s *no* commentary — I feel like it costs me two clicks to get to TFA, and I’m not getting twice as much value for that extra click.

    If clutter is to be reduced, I’d prefer the Chuq Snarks links be omitted from Twitter, or tweeted under a different name. But I can also just train myself to ignore them; one problem is that I keep clicking the link by reflex, after months (years?) of clicking Things You’ll Find Interesting.

    I’ve hesitated to complain because I *thought* you might be going somewhere with this, and even suspected you might be unifying your link-sharing approaches.

    Henceforth I’ll train myself to ignore the Chuq Snark tweets and visit the Tumblr directly every day or so. (I don’t bother with an RSS reader any more — I just visit the sites I like whenever I feel the urge to read a little something.)

    Just a data point for you. I realize I’m just one reader.

    • http://www.chuqui.com chuqui

      Whether or not to link the Tumblr to twitter was something I thought about a lot before implementing. I’m still open to changing that or removing it — I do think the implementation is sub-optimal but I don’t see a way to improve it without much pain and work I can’t do right now.

      So I open this up to wider discussion. I want all of your feedback on this. I ended up deciding to turn it on because in looking at what others are doing, it’s a technique becoming more common; my view is that if it isn’t a best practice today, it’s on its way to being one.

      I’ll also note that the average readership per item on the tumblr blog was already higher than the average daily readership for similar items on the old system, even before I did any links from my site or announcements that the tumblr existed. So the move to tumblr and linking to twitter has already increased readership. That doesn’t imply it’s the right way to do this; it does imply it’s had a positive effect on things being seen.

      My best argument against doing it is that people are turning twitter into a dumping ground for everything they do, and joining in doing so may not be the right thing. This might be the bridge mom used to tell you not to jump off of. Then again, your youtube video of jumping off the bridge might go viral and get you a pistachio commercial on the super bowl… You don’t know until you try…

      So I’m not convinced this is the right solution. I was convinced it was a solution worth trying. And to judge it, I’d like to hear as much feedback as people want to give me, either here or by email. Or twitter… I’m certainly open to changing my mind, especially given how ambivalent I was about this at the start.

      I will also admit that my still depending on an RSS reader seems to make me “old school” now, but for certain types of sites, it lets me get through a lot of links more efficiently than anything else I’ve found…

      • Andy

        To be clear, if the links in Twitter went directly to TFA I’d be much happier with that mechanism. There’s usually enough info in the tweet and in the URL for me to decide whether I’m interested in the link. If there were more commentary, and if commentary was more the norm, I wouldn’t mind the extra level of indirection — I’d welcome it.

        I liked Things You’ll Find Interesting, because even though it came with *no* commentary, it only cost me one click to get to a page of seven links. So to read seven articles would cost me eight clicks, not fourteen, and I could quickly line up browser tabs containing the articles, by Command-clicking.

        I see the Snarks Tumblr shaping up to be like the links on Daring Fireball, which usually come with short excerpts and optional brief remarks. I don’t know how typical I am in just going to the site a few times a day instead of using a reader. Note that Gruber does *not* tweet links to his own “here’s a link” entries, though I think he may tweet links to his longer articles. (I don’t follow him on Twitter, so not sure.)

        Dropping RSS wasn’t a conscious decision for me. I was surprised one day to discover I hadn’t launched NetNewsWire in months. I deleted the app and its archives with no sense of loss. Very surprising.

        I can probably get used to whatever system you settle on. The article titles on marco.org used to bug me a lot. Sometimes the title is the permalink for that blog entry; sometimes it’s a link to an article, not his own, that he means to send us to. I still dislike that, but I’ve trained myself to recognize which is which (they’re visually different, in a way that makes sense when I think about it) and I got used to it.

        • http://www.chuqui.com chuqui

          If the links went directly to TFA, that’d be awesome, but we’re working with twitter here, and they’re busily trying to become facebook and want everything to stickily live within their ecosystem.

          I’d prefer it if the links that get posted to twitter went to the source (the “daring fireball link” method, but right now, I don’t know how to do that without buidling a custom CMS and my own publishing methods and… and that’s more work than I want to commit to right now.

          You’re right that the Snarks tumblr is influenced by the Daring Fireball linking. I like it, with one exception — if you do a lot of it, it tends to clutter up the blog. So I’ve been thinking about ways to have it both ways, the ability to link to interesting stuff as I see it without having “am I linking to too many things” staring over my shoulder and snickering, while still keeping blog clutter to a minimum. The answer to that, it seems to me, is a second venue for links, and then finding ways to curate (I know, I’m way too in love with that word) that info into a digest back into the main blog.

          Twitter as a secondary distribution channel? I’m not sure what I’m doing is best. I’m not sure what best practices ought to be here. So I’m experimenting. I may stop it. I may change it. I may grow to like it. we’ll see…

          • Andy Lee

            Thanks for the patient and thoughtful replies. I just tweeted a definition of “curate” — to put things in the “queue” that you “rate” highly. :)