I’m in a bit of a blog transition right now, with Oddly Together’s future hanging in uncertainty. A man has got to live and feed his family, so I have to make Chronicle of Technology, Culture and Stupidity and my subbranded site at Betanews the greater priorities. The latter site pays, the other doesn’t, but it could someday. So could Oddly Together.

When I launched Oddly Together a few months ago, I had closed down Chronicle of Technology, Culture and Stupidity. My plan was to do technology blogging at Betanews and cultural, societal and storytelling blogging here. But the other blog, at joewilcox.com, had been around for a long time (that was good for search traffic and incoming links) and based on comments my readers there didn’t follow me to Betanews. So joewilcox.com is back and sucking away some of the blog topics I might otherwise do here. Additionally, I’ve converted that site to microblogging, even though WordPress as configured is nowhere as suitable as Tumblr.

Are you following any of this? I’m lost trying to explain it. Other changes: I ditched a Mac running Snow Leopard for Sony VAIO running Windows 7. Everyone knows the cool kids use Macs, or so I assume that means Tumblrs. My birthday passed, and I turned another decade—now making me 20 or more years older than most Tumblrs. But what I originally planned for Oddly Together otherwise fits well with the Tumblr community.

The Tumblr team is improving features all the time, and perhaps a little Posterous competition helps there. As much as I like Tumblr as a publishing platforms, limitations bug me:

• Content management is bearish at best
• Other than adapting something like Disqus, there is no real commenting
• Social networking features, while good, pale behind services like TypePad

I love that there are new Tumblr themes everyday, and someday, when I’ve got time, I may do my own. When it comes to CSS, I’m in need of some Dummies books. But I can code HTML. Hell, I supported my family in 1995 and 1996 coding HTML Websites (back in the day before WYSIWYG editors). Other aspects of the publishing platform just click. It suits me. I’d pay, absolutely I would, if David Karp and crew offered some premium features. Sign me up, baby.

I’ve considered other services. I have successfully exported all posts (except this one) from Tumblr to WordPress XML. The export opens up plenty of possibilities, such as TypePad.com and WordPress.com—or even Posterous. Themes suck at all three sites. TypePad themes are boring, and custom themes aren’t allowed at WordPress.com; that’s a benefit exclusive to third-party hosted WordPress. Posterous just added some themes, f-f-f-f-five of them, and all measure hurl on the yuck meter. I could preserve link structure at Posterous or WordPress.com by pointing the Oddly Together domain there. TypePad has far better features—most everything I’d want—but last century’s infrastructure. Publishing isn’t really dynamic, .html would break all my links and theme customization is convoluted.

So the question remains: Is Tumblr the place where I belong, where Oddly Together can fit in? Or am I just not cool enough for this crowd and need to retire to the old folks’ blog? Tumblr is a community as much as a blogging service. Is it the community for which this blogger and blog can find a place?

[Note: Illustration by Paul McDougall, added June 4, 2010.]

Do you have a tumblr story that you’d like told? Please email Joe Wilcox: oddlytogether at gmail dot com.