As much as I’m generally quick to sing the praises of WordPress, it isn’t exactly the simplest blog platform for the beginning blogger. The user interface — even with the apparent major upgrades in the shiny new version 2.5 — can be far too overwhelming for the person who only needs a blog platform for publishing a quick message or pasting a photo or two

Tumblr is a far more lightweight platform solution, and it’s the one I went when setting up a family blog that my wife could post to during her stay in Kenya this month.

How to post

You start in the dashboard area. And just as with the rest of Tumblr, the dashboard’s interface is intuitive easy to follow. Writing a text post? Select text. Need to post an image? Click photo. And so forth. It’s drop-dead simple for any of the seven main posting options.

Here are a few more screen captures to give you an idea of the posting process:

Simple. Logical. Fast.

What it is — and isn’t

Tumblr doesn’t come with a full set of extras. It doesn’t appear to support reader comments (so, yes, we could argue whether it’s actually a blog publisher — but I’m not going there with this post), trackbacks, or categories.

(Update on April 5:  As it turns out, you can enable comments and trackbacks on a Tumblr blog, but you’ll need to use an outside commenting service such as Disqus or Haloscan and also know how to mess with the code from the Tumblr dashboard area).

But really, so what? Tumblr is meant to serve as a quick-and-easy publishing application rather than a robust blogging platform. I’d say Tumblr does what it does quite nicely — and that’s just fine with me.

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