As I alluded to somewhat recently, I have long been concerned about what types of content to post on my main blog and what things to publish in other venues, or to keep to myself. Early on, I published everything to a single blog, and just hoped that the content would mesh, because, well, it's just a personal blog. Later on, I moved to more personal content as I became a melodramatic college student with some health issues, and later still, as my health issues evened out a little bit and I tried to formalize my publishing process, I transitioned almost entirely to technical and opinion writing about technology and similar topics, such as infrastructure, platforms, product design, and networking issues. Somewhat interestingly, any time I have been inspired to write about music or other media, it has gone in with the blog, even when the blog didn't have "personal" content on it.
Today, I have this site, and although it's using Microsoft SharePoint, I don't necessarily perceive it as a professional endeavor, nor is it run as part of a workplace. In addition, I have an active tumblr, an old WordPress site, and a collection of static HTML files, most of which are only still up because I have yet to migrate the content into my existing site. Among them, the tumblr stands apart as being something I continue to have thoughts about publishing less formal content to, either a stream of photographs, smaller thoughts, links I come across, and other short pieces.
Instead of ever re-visiting the Tumblr site, what I have ended up doing is using a journaling application on my iPhone/iPad/Mac to collect thoughts, shorter pieces, some photos of what I'm doing or seeing, and more personal reactions to things or experiences. If you laid the stuff out and added some Captain America fan art and maybe some retrocomputing GIFs, it would basically look like a Tumblr. The question is at what point something belongs on my primary blog and at what point do you really need to keep it private. For me, tumblr is an awkward space in the middle where after a paragraph or two of text, it probably merits being put on my main blog, and anything too personal is probably better left un-published anyway.
And, that brings up another somewhat entertaining notion: Who on earth is going to publish Captain America fan art and GIFs on a SharePoint site? SharePoint is more than capable of it, of course. (In fact, annoyingly, the only thing I have yet to be able to do with SharePoint is embed YouTube videos.) I have never specifically wanted to re-blog Captain America (say, from my friend Cat) but it's nice to have the option, should the mood strike.
Among my typical towers of text, a shorter reaction (ideally published when a little more timely) or even some good GIFs could bring some good variety to the blog.
For now, I'm not going to be using the Tumblr again, but it's worth noting that it's on my radar. Tumblr as an overall concept is really interesting and I've always thought of it as a platform that attempted to remove as much unnecessary friction as possible to adding something to your stream. I've considered resuming writing about music and putting that on Tumblr, if for no other reason than Tumblr allows embedding YouTube videos, however linking out to the site has been good enough as a solution in the past, so I'm not specifically worried about how I'd do that. More than anything else, I really need to work on getting some of my old content into the SharePoint site, just so I can start shutting down other sites.