The Best Blogging Platform is…

Tumblr.

By far.

If you’re not familiar with Tumblr, don’t let the stupid name put you off. While everyone has been nattering on about Twitter, Tumblr has built what is very nearly the perfect tool for publishing on the web. It’s easily the best blogging platform in existence. Why?

It’s incredibly easy, and it scales effortlessly from Twitter-length messages to full-length blog posts with images, multimedia – whatever you like.

Some elitist techie gatekeepers may not like this ease of use, but I say screw ‘em.  It’s a new day, people.

Here’s how you do it with Tumblr:

1. Go to tumblr.com (time: 1 second).
    
2. Sign up. Fill in three text fields – your email, a password, and the name you want, i.e. xxxx.tumblr.com (time: maybe 10 seconds).
    
3. You are taken to your Dashboard page. From there, click one of these buttons, and share something: (time: whatever you like).

   Each type of post has a built-in code snippet that tells it to treat each type of post differently, with zero effort on your part. Audio files you upload are served up in a sweet little Flash-based player. Quotes are pre-formatted with blockquote styling. Everything looks like it should – automatically.

4. Done. You don’t even need a title for your post. It’s amazing how freeing that is.
    
5. (optional) Put a “Share on Tumblr” button in your toolbar (get it from the “Goodies” page). When you see something you want to share on the web, click the button. Absurdly easy.
    
6. (optional) Surf other tumblelogs (yes, that’s what they call them), and when you like a post, click the “re-blog” button. It’s added to your blog, with the proper attribution.
    
7. (optional) Customize your look. Although Tumblr is the first and only platform whose default style looks absolutely great, there are plenty of excellent, free styles to chose from.
    
8. (optional) Make your own style (if you’re handy with CSS), point your own domain at your blog, add custom html/javascript…do your thing.
    
9. (optional) Get fancy. Publish RSS feeds, post via email, phone, IM, OSX widget. Import posts from your other blog with one click. Embed this blog in your other one with a tiny bit of code. Use third party tools and mash it up. Follow other users – yes, like Twitter, only much much better.

You’ll soon see that Tumblr scales up and down with your thoughts, from random asides to lengthy manifestos. Find something on the web, and want to share it without jumping through hoops? No problem, click one button. Just had a funny thought, but not enough for a blog post? Scribble it out and click a button. Found a great photo of Mr. T and Nancy Reagan smoking crack? Please send it to me privately – I think we could get some money for that. Everything else, put it on Tumblr.

Oh, and all the cool kids are doing it:

For a few examples of what you can do with this amazing tool, check out the winners of this year’s Tumblr Awards, announced on Friday.

And have I mentioned that this is all free? 

There is no longer any excuse. Take your passion. Make it happen. Et cetera.

p.s. Yes, I’m using WordPress for this blog. Though it is annoying, complicated, time-consuming and difficult to maintain, it’s still more suitable for long, editorial-style posts, and some of the plug-ins are must-haves for a blog of this type. But I may just switch over any day now. Meanwhile, I’ve been toying around with it here.

p.p.s.: As with anything, there are disadvantages: the data is on their servers, with no back-up option. If they perceive you as a spammer, they’ll “disappear” you faster than Dick Cheney. But if you own your own domain, use a roll-your-own backup tool (Google “Tumblr backup”), and play nice, you should stay happy.

CSS Grid Design Made Easy

Via ISO50 comes word of an excellent (and free) tool for grid-based CSS layout: Grid Designer 2, by Danish web developer Rasmus Shultz.

For anyone not yet on the grid, here are two nice introductory pieces, some more resources, and a couple of well-known systems.

Grid Designer 2 allows you to mock up a complete grid design online in a single open source script. Incredibly, it’s only three simple steps:

1. Columns

Input the number and width of the desired columns. Use the buttons, or type in numeric values. You can play with the gutters and margins to your heart’s content, while previewing live on screen.

2. Typography

Now it gets fun. Adjust the fonts, styles, leading, spacing, line height and more, again with live preview. Paragraph and H1 through H6 are all available.

3. Export

Are you kidding? Yes, unbelievably, we’re done. Grid Designer outputs the CSS style sheet and an html container, scalable if you wish. Copy it, use it, love it.

I’ve just begun playing with this, but as I’m sure you can tell, I’m pretty impressed. I’m sure the output will require some tweaking unless you want a straight-laced, magazine-style grid.

Also, despite the alert stating “NEW! Now supports designs with spanning columns!” it looks to me like you’d have to add these manually after the fact. If anyone can see that I’m missing something, please let me know.

In any case, Grid Designer 2 gets five stars so far, and I look forward to using it for real very soon. Thanks Rasmus!

Web-safe Fonts: the Beginning of the End?

Web-safe fonts.

A nice, friendly-sounding phrase; it’s even got that comforting word “safe” in the middle.

But for web designers, that phrase is as comforting as a straitjacket. For print designers, finding out about web-safe fonts is like learning there’s no Santa Claus. And if you’re just someone who appreciates the beauty of typography, you may just be wondering why the web is so damn ugly.

It’s those web-safe fonts.

Since 1996, when Microsoft designated the web-safe font families in their “Core fonts for the Web” program, designers have been restricted to a tiny group out of the tens of thousands of existing fonts.

Not only that, but designers are forced to specify a replacement in case the desired font is unavailable, and a last-resort font-family (e.g. “sans-serif”) for the worst-case scenario. This means you can never test all possible appearances of a page without knowing what fonts are installed on the user’s machine. That doesn’t exactly encourage bold, innovative design.

Perhaps most offensive to some was the inclusion of Arial, Microsoft’s copyright-avoiding knockoff of Helvetica, which is perhaps the best-loved font in existence, and even the subject of a full-length film of the same name.

Basically, web typography sucks and web-safe fonts are an ugly, constricting anachronism. But the end may be near; the Holy Grail of rich typography for the web could be around the corner.

There have been numerous attempts to solve the problem of web-safe fonts before. First was plain old image replacement, which did the job for large logos and the occasional headline. But unless properly tagged, they sent no information to screen readers or search engines, the text could not be copied/pasted, and entire pages were out of the question.

Then there were embedded fonts (too big), SiFR (a slow, complicated Flash workaround with accessibility issues), DTR (relies on server-generated images, basically a fancy version of simple image replacement), FLIR (an attempt at a better SiFR), and others.

Today, Smashing Magazine reports on upcoming CSS3 support for custom web fonts with the @font-face tag. This calls a font from a specific URL to be used in the page, just like a call to a remote script or stylesheet.

Actually, this isn’t really news, since it was first proposed for CSS2 and has been growing in support for some time. Safari users are already seeing it, and it’s planned for the next major update to Firefox. As usual, Internet Explorer lags behind, in this case due to Microsoft’s insistence on using their own “Embedded OpenType” technology…sound familiar?

But thanks to the rapidly-growing adoption of better browsers, designers may start designing for the best-case scenario, with a back-up plan for the worst – not the other way around.

Usage licenses still apply of course, and there is the obligatory intellectual property debate among font creators. Discussion of a universal web type library has already begun. But there are more than enough fonts available right now to give our tired eyes a rest from the stalest of the web-safe fonts, like Tahoma and Trebuchet.

Which means a whole universe of fonts will soon be appearing all over the web – just maybe in this new year.

Better 12 years late than never.