Vale, Vox. Salve, Tumblr.


I’ve had a Vox blog for about a year and a half. I didn’t need another blog, but I was fascinated by the advertised “LiveJournal-for-Grownups” that Vox was meant to be. It would have all of the social interactivity, little or none of the bad design and clique-fueled drama. Seemed like a good idea. So I fired up a Vox account, deemed it a “reading blog,” and …

Then I proceeded to enter into a cycle of occasional posting between long bouts of forgetting the Vox blog even existed.

This is not to say that Vox was a total loss. Several of the MetaChat faithful — a Metafilter spin-off — started up Vox blogs of their own. But like me, they started to drop off in their posting frequency. Before long, posting to my Vox reading blog felt like shouting my literary habits down a deep well … or down the long hallway of a mostly vacant hotel.

So I’m making it official. Until today, my last Vox post was back in October. Today, I’m posting one more time to link back over here.

It’s been interesting Vox, but I’m moving on.

Now, brace yourself, because I’m going to look like a hypocrite for a split second. Ready?

I’ve been playing with a Tumblr blog for a couple of weeks.

I signed up on a lark, having seen some of my neighbors doing the same (Amber has one, for instance). What makes Tumblr different is the simplicity of it all. No comments. No post titles. Just post after post, photos with or without captions, quotes presented as typographical art. To me, it feels like a slow-stream-of-consciousness Twitter. Where Twitter is all about what you’re doing at a given time, Tumblr is more about relating just what’s on your mind from day to day, from hour to hour. And like Twitter, you can opt to “follow” the meandering thoughts of your fellow Tumblrs.

Like I say in my Tumblr sidebar, if Grabbingsand is a motorcycle, my Tumblr is a sidecar. It’s a bonus track for my regular blog, a place to put random bits of awesome or the occasional odd thought. And if frequency of use is any indication of successful adoption, then Tumblr is defeating my history with Vox handilly.

So check it out.

And make your own, should you feel so inclined.


2 responses to “Vale, Vox. Salve, Tumblr.”

  1. Hey, I want to archive my Vox pregnancy blog. Any good suggestions as to how to do that? My fallback plan is to PDF each page…

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