Creamy Middles used to be hosted on Tumblr, but I've moved it to Blogspot for several key reasons.
To begin with, I wasn't getting satisfaction from any of the network effects that make Tumblr so attractive. My goal is to get in front of eyeballs and then burrow into brains. Tumblr's Dashboard holds the promise that following new Tumblelogs is that much easier, but in practice I found that relatively few of my social contacts use the platform, and my posting style (for now) doesn't lend itself to the Tumblr demographic, as I don't have the energy to post every day and publish more longer posts than the average Tumblrer.
That means that most of my traffic was coming from linking to posts on Twitter and Facebook. I can do that with any blogging platform.
Moreover, what posts did gain traction didn't actually direct anybody back to Creamy Middles. The prime example is the post in which I quoted Jeff Tweedy, of Wilco, telling Chicago Grid why he licenses his music for use in movies. That post was re-blogged and liked (at last check) 14,063 times.
Now, I didn't actually do much of anything. At most, you could say I identified the most interesting thing about the interview. In a just world, a shitload of traffic would go back to Chicago Grid's original post, though I doubt many people clicked through.
Why do I think that? Because as the post went semi-viral and started ricocheting around Tumblr, Creamy Middles only saw about 20-30 hits per day, according to Google Analytics. That's the usual total, by the way. I think I remember seeing it peak at 50 one day, but that could have been because I shared something else on Facebook that a bunch of my friends thought interesting enough to click to see.
All that's to say that I used Tumblr for purposes that Twitter and Facebook fulfill already. And in the end, if I'm going to get the same 20 pageviews every day with Blogspot that I would with Tumblr, it's not worth being on Tumblr. After all, without a significant distribution boost, giving up real copyright control -- the platform IS a sharing platform, so you can't use Tumblr and reasonably contend that your work is all-rights-reserved -- isn't worth it.
Less important, but still significant: Blogspot's CMS is head and shoulders above Tumblr's. After importing all my posts to the new platform, I was able to go back and make simple fixes to various posts entirely within the CMS, something Tumblr simply can't handle.
Moreover, I had to hack together a solution to put bylines on posts in Tumblr that involved creating dummy Tumblr accounts for guest posters and naming those dummy accounts' primary blogs with the guest posters' names. That is, Tumblr bylines won't display just any name; they display the title of that profile's primary Tumbleblog.
That's not to say there aren't aspects of Tumblr that I'll miss. The super-intuitive, super-simple dashboard posting options, and the ability to specify a type of post (Text, Photo, Video, Audio, et cetera) is a wonderful feature. I'm also a big fan of responsive design, and there is no free responsive design template for Blogspot that I'd feel comfortable using, whereas there are many such Tumblr designs that look great.
But in the end, I think this is the right move. I cobbled together this look, largely inspired by Gawker's redesign, and, while I'm sure there will be other little bugs that will pop up, the two that bother me most at the moment are that iTunes hasn't yet picked up the slightly altered podcast feed, and the search function appears wonky, likely because Google's spiders haven't yet canvassed the site, though I suspect it could be screwy because I've been messing with the CSS so much.
In any event, here's to a new era for Creamy Middles. Do drop by often.
(Image cc-licensed: "Life is Tumblr" by Romain Toornier)