I Don’t Wanna’ Give Fixes, I Wanna’ Give Thoughts

AintAGeek.com used to use Wordpress as its CMS installed on a server of mine. But then I decided to make the move to Tumblr. Tumblr is a service that hosts everything on their own end, even if you use your own domain name. That’s cool, I respect that, but it means that nothing else can be used for that domain name besides email.

This sucks because it means I can’t create an “old” version of AintAGeek.com to leave up for all the articles I’ve written that people are still linking to and relying on. I still have the files on my server, but they can’t be accessed without a domain name to link them to.

But whatever, that’s life. Like, I wanna’ move away from the “tips and tricks” and more into “opinions and thoughts”. I mean, I don’t wanna’ put in my own personal time to create a web site that serves as a utility for people, the same way Yahoo Answers does. Screw fixing people’s problems online, I do that in real life… I wanna’ have a conversation with people, even if it has to be one-way and even if it means a much smaller audience. In all honesty, people can get just as much help from a tech support forum than they can if I post up an article on how to fix or do something. In fact, I don’t even mind posting a link to someone else’s web site on how to fix something versus solving the issue myself.

What I want is to become a trusted voice online, ya know? I want people to get to know me and start to trust in my opinions or thoughts. If I happen to mention something like “This new online service is pointless, don’t use it.”, even if everyone and their brother claims otherwise, I want them to be like “Yo, I’m gonna’ listen to JbB, he’s proven himself right many times before.”.

See, that’s a lot more interesting to me. I’d rather hear someone say “Thanks for recommending this, I love it and would have made a mistake if it wasn’t for you.” than “Thanks for fixing my problem.”.

That’s where Tumblr comes in. I like the idea of no comments on posts. The standard blog posting system is just too rigid and non-social for those who don’t got more than 500,000 visitors a month. So like you’ll enable comments on your posts, but since your talking about topical issues, no one comments on them within that day or week. By the time they finally get around to commenting and an actual discussion forms, you, the author, are done and over with that topic and have written many more since. And then there’s the issue of accidentally ignoring comments on old or obscure posts, making it seem like you don’t care to respond (and by the time you finally respond, that commenter has long forgotten about you). And what’s worse are all these social media buttons and comment this, retweet that… if your like the majority of all blogs out there (aka small), all these “0” counts on comments or social media crap really makes you look (or at least feel) like a failure (even if your getting thousands of unique visitors a month).

And that’s if your relatively small. Comments become a problem once you become popular too. You’ll create a short post that maybe took you 10 minutes but within an hour or day you’ve got hundreds of comments! Wha’do ya do? Do you decide to spend an hour reading and commenting to those people, or do you instead spend that time writing another post? And don’t think getting so many comments are a good thing either. Most of the time, comments will be by those who disagree with you… probably about 1% of your readers. Then those who respond to the disagreeing commenters are people pointing out why they disagree with the disagreers and the cycle repeats over and over and over… and we’re just talking about one post.

Popular articles or posts online that feature comments are really nothing but commenter death match, or if your not popular yet, commenter wastelands. I’d rather have my posts reshared, liked or post a link to it on your own social network or blog and comment on why you agree with it or disagree with it. That’s why I turned to Tumblr in the first place. Wordpress has no such system in place. Sure, there’s Disqus or social media sharing buttons… but shit, I used them from the start and they aren’t the same as Tumblr.

I’m still field-testing Tumblr, but Tumblr has a lot to offer and I want AintAGeek.com to be a lot more social and networked than it was living out on its own in the vast sea of the Internet. JbB