Tumblr’s built-in themes are great on their own, but then you have designers knocking it out of the park on free templates like Sean Farrell’s new theme Leatherbound, or premium themes like Vintage Scrapbook by Pixel Union and I have to admit to a bit of blog envy.

Tumblr is a simplified tool for blogging, so perhaps I’m drawn to the simplicity of the designs, but I’m having a hard time finding themes on par for WordPress. It’s not that WordPress is lacking in the themes department. ThemeForest recently announced that they now have over 1000 WordPress themes. Sifting through those 1000 designs, I see that many of the premium themes out there are focused on taking your weblog beyond the basic blog. Magazine styles and portfolio styles abound, but none of those fit my needs.

I have a simple weblog and I need a simple, but elegant template. This may explain why designers are drawn to doing Tumblr templates. The format is standardized and simple in nature and doesn’t require that you design with a framework in mind, or with the expectation that — through custom plugins and custom fields — a user will expand your work beyond the basic blog and thereby “break” your design.

Could that be it? Tumblr is easier to design for and that’s why so many designers are trying their hand at it? To test this theory and end my frustrations with my earlier searches, I Googled for “Tumblr WordPress Themes” and was surprised to find a couple of good links with decent resources.

22 Tumblr Style WordPress Themes and Microblog in WordPress with these 15+ Tumblr Style WordPress Themes both yielded some nice designs that were definitely in line with what I’ve run into for Tumblr. Below are a few my favorites:

• LightBright
• Minblr
• Wumblr
• Memoir

With thousands of themes out there both in free and premium models, roughly 25 are in a “Tumblr Style”. That’s not a lot. Maybe I’m an edge case, but Tumblr is clearly capturing mindshare and I have to think that some of it is due to it’s simplicity and great looking themes.

FFFFound.com looked like the ticket, but you have to be invited to participate and even then it looked like a bit of a pile. Then I figured that Tumblr might just be the ticket. I’ve heard nothing but rave reviews about the service and how easy it is, so I figured I’d give it a whirl.

Suffice to say that I wasn’t all that impressed. Granted, I’m a bit old school and tend to post everything in HTML anyway, most of the bells and whistles of posting photos, etc. where kind of meh. I loved the way the blog looked, but being unable to post because of a service outage was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Besides, what I discovered was that posting to Tumblr was no different than posting to my blog — so why not just do that?!?

So, I swept up some of the dust and cobwebs, switched the theme to Modernist 2.0 and plan to move the two posts I did on Tumblr over to mashby.com

In other words…

I thought it might be helpful to explain the tools behind mashby.com, so below are the four tools that make up my blogging toolbox.

WordPress

At the heart of my tool set is the Content Management System (CMS) that I use to manage all the content on this blog. The software I use is called WordPress.

I’ve written before about how wonderful WordPress is in an article entitle Alchemy In Action, so there’s no need to to repeat myself. However, I will add that since I wrote that over a year ago, WordPress has just gotten better-and-better. It’s an amazing blogging platform and it’s what allows all the other tools I use to really shine.


MarsEdit

As great as WordPress is, I find that I prefer to create my articles in an off-line editor versus creating the posts through a web browser. My tool of choice is MarsEdit by Red Sweater software.

Do I have to use an offline editor? Of course not, but there’s something special about being able to save drafts of posts, or easily format images in software written specifically for the Mac. There are a bevy of features, such as a robust WYSIWYG editor and the ability to have a perfect preview of your article before you publish, but the following are the key features for me:

• Ability to save drafts — I tend to write in fits and starts due mostly to interruptions. With MarsEdit I can save an article I’m working on and then finish it later.
• Easy Image Posting — Posting images is as easy as dragging and dropping directly into the article. The image will upload when the article is published, but I can position it and see what it looks like in preview prior to publishing. Brilliantly easy and this feature alone is worth the price of the software.
• External Editors — I’ll go into detail on this one in the next section, but when I really need to focus, this one little trick is worth it’s weight in gold.
• Support For Multiple Blogs — I actually use MarsEdit for multiple sites, so having one tool to publish from is a big help.

Write Room

Sometimes I need to drown out some of the distractions on my desktop. E-mail, instant messengers, not to mention Twitter can make my desktop a bit of a minefield. So when I need to focus just on the text of what I’m writing, I turn to WriteRoom, by Hogsbay Software.

It may seem like a simple tool, which it is, but it can make a big impact on helping you to focus. Everything drops away behind a solid background and all that remains is the simple text and cursor. The only thing I can focus on is typing. In the immortal words of Stimpy, “Joy!”

Thankfully MarsEdit supports external editors, so I simply select “File \ Edit in WriteRoom” and I’m now in typing bliss. When I’m done, or ready to do some fine tuning with links and images, I simply hit escape, and save and close WriteRoom and everything imports back into MarsEdit.

The process is actually so smooth, you’d think that the two programs were written by the same developer.

Skitch

Last but certainly not least in my toolbox of blogging must-haves is Skitch.

Skitch is a unique imaging tool that lives directly in your title bar. When you need to grab an image, you simply take a quick screenshot and drop it into MarsEdit. It literally couldn’t be easier.

If you need to do some editing, you can resize, crop, add text, or graphics and of course name the file. It’s intuitive and easy to use and best of all — it’s free!

I use Skitch all the time, not just for blogging and I really wish these guys would ask for money. I would happily pay for it and I want to ensure that the program stays around. It’s not a replacement for Photoshop, but for 99% of us image editing mortals, it’s more than enough for what you need.

Conclusion

So there you have it. My complete arsenal of tools and how I use them. Hopefully some of what I shared may be of use to you and may assist you in finding an easier way to manage, edit and publish to your blog.

To show you how all of these tools work together, I threw together a quick screencast so you can see each tool in action. Enjoy.

The blog is comprised of very short entries that almost come off as jokes from a FOO stand up routine, if it weren’t for their somewhat elitist tone. Being somewhat elitist myself, I found nearly every entry a riot, but a few were real standouts.

Ready?

We flew in to San Francisco as we’ve done a dozen times over these past few months.

Our tiny jet is more a floating foyer than a formal jetliner and, at 40,000 feet, the rules and conventions of commercial air travel simply do not apply.

“I’ll bet I could get that door opened before you could kill me,” she said in a voice that she would likely have described as playful.

I finished my scotch, turned my seat toward hers, and unbuckled my restraint.

“Ready?” I asked.

I’ll bet we never speak of this again.

It appears that several people write for the blog and it’s full of little tidbits of clever conversations. Conversations where the writer has the perfect comeback that most people think of 10 minutes later. Check it out, it’s worth the read.

The feature set of MoveableType and WordPress are virtually the same. I really haven’t found where WP does something that MT can’t do, or vice versa. The difference is HOW each product approaches publishing online. There is something distinctly different in the WP approach that makes it much more accessible. It’s not just in the user interface, or the fact that WP uses PHP instead of PERL — it’s how the entirety of the application has been designed and you have to experience it to understand it. WP is just a much more coherent approach to publishing. It works better, it feels better and it helps me publish to the point that the tool actually disappears from my perspective. MT, on the other hand, feels more like I’m trying to pull a donkey up a hill. I’m constantly having to fight against the program to complete the task at hand.

These differences were recently brought to my attention as I compared how SixApart and Automattic addressed adding Social Networking to their product lines. Products like FaceBook, Twitter and YouTube have changed how people market their sites/products/services online. It’s now common practice to promote through all of these channels to draw traffic to your site, but there’s a new trend on the rise that is looking to reverse that process.

The new question that is being asked is “Instead of going out to these various networks, why not have them come to us?” In answer to that question, SixApart has released Motion and Automattic has released BuddyPress.

At first glance they may look similar, but as you dig into it, it’s clear that BuddyPress has a much more coherent approach and is easier to understand. When I first watched the video for Motion, I kept going “Huh? How am I supposed to use this?” If you take a look at the Motion Demo, you’ll see what I mean. It’s just a pile. In my office, we have a nickname for Facebook. We call it FacePile, because it just dumps a pile of various and sundry information at your feet. Motion does that to an even greater degree. After looking at the demo, the only feeling I’m left with is “Why?” Why would someone want this on their site?

Then you take a look at the BuddyPress Demo and there’s a remarkable difference. It’s clearly designed to mirror the FaceBook style of community, but it’s cleaner and clearer as to what you can do and how everything works. In fact, I think it’s fair to say that it’s a better design that FaceBook! I’m currently developing a new community web site and I actually had to stop and think about BuddyPress for quite some time. So at the end of the demo, I’m left thinking “How would I use this?” Not, “Why would I use this?”

So What’s Your Point?
Most of what I do on a day-to-day basis is work with users and distill down complex technology systems into plain english for my clients, friends and family. I guess you could say that I live in the world of interaction between user and interface.

So often when I’m talking with a developer and the subject of UI comes up, they just roll their eyes and dismiss it out of hand. Since it’s not quantifiable and algorithmic, it gets treated like alchemy — which perhaps is right — but the attitude is one of disdain and frustration, not of respect and appreciation.

Add to this equation the fact that I’m not a designer, so my vocabulary is a little limited when describing systems and UI. Then along comes two answers to the same question and I can finally point and say, “Do THAT, not that.” and I find that a little exhilarating.

This example also reminds me why I enjoy WordPress so much and why moving away from MovableType was such a good decision.

This happened to my good buddy Mike Rohde with an article that he did on Yoplait yogurt. He wrote a quick article about an idea he had regarding their packaging and next thing you know, he’s in the top 4 on Google if you do a search for yogurt packaging.

As for me, my hotspots have been Grandpa’s Pine Tar Soap (currently slipped to page 2) and National Brand 43-571 (page 1) because of an entry I wrote concerning my love affair with paper. However, in looking at my Google Analytics this week, I found that the bulk of the traffic to my blog comes from an entry entitled “Having A Hard Head Can Sometimes Pay Off“. Doing a search for “Axiom and Garageband” turned up the reason why — I’m the #1 result.

The article dealt with my trials and tribulations in getting my Axiom 25 to work with GarageBand. It was a project I did almost 2 years ago and one month after the post, I never went back to it. Another case of something I “had to have” only to move onto something else 20-days later.

Regardless of my lack of interest in the subject, clearly there were plenty of people still looking for a solution, finding me and as luck would have it, being met with frustration. Over the past year, I’ve hacked this site every which way and never really completed the process. It goes a little something like this.

1. A client of mine wants to change something with their install of MoveableType.

2. I apply it to this site first to see if it’ll work.

3. It does/doesn’t and then I usually, but not always, revert the site back to the way it was and you can see where this is going.

All these changes affected my Axiom / GarageBand article when they broke the download to the PDF that provided the solution. Doh! So this afternoon, I updated the PDF, checked all the links, fixed the download tool I use to keep track of such things and generally cleaned this up a bit in the process.

So for those of you that found that article only to be met with frustration, I apologize. Hopefully the revised article will be more helpful. As for me, I’m going to be a bit more cognoscent of the long tail of my articles so that they don’t spank me in the butt.

Of course, this opens up a whole different train of thought, such as movies and other interests that I have. Palm OS Devices have been such a large part of my life since 1997 and I have plenty of outlets for that passion, but there’s other passions that I have such as movies, food, etc. and I’m not quite sure what to do with it all. For example, I signed up for NetFlix in November 2002 and since then I’ve rated over 558 movies, have 106 movies in my on-line queue and have watched approximately 35 movies since then. Those movies include the first two and a half seasons of The Sopranos (12 1-hour episodes each season) and as if that wasn’t enough, I’m not talking about the fact that I usually watch each movie twice because I want to hear the director’s commentary the second time. Wow, this is sounding more like a support group confession than a little “ditty” about a hobby.

Macaulay Culkin from Home Alone

After talking with Mike Rohde about his weblog and how he was about to keep his family and fiends up-to-date with his family’s coming and goings, I decided to take the plunge. I don’t know quite yet what this web site will turn in to, but I guess we can find out together.