If you have an eye for such things, you will have noticed that in addition to changing the domain name of the Reader I have also switched from hosting on Posterous to Tumblr.

Why? The main motivation was that I’ve grown bloody tired for making blog posts using email editors. Emailing content to Posterous was certainly easy but it leadens you with whatever HTML your email client decides to give you, and both Postbox and Gmail are pretty bad at it. If the clients are not inserting extraneous div’s or line break tags, they are adding in their own CSS directives. Enough.

I’ve been tumblelogging (as _why defined it) since 2007 but in the last year I’ve noticed more content on Tumblr that goes beyond “curation”. I have been thinking of switching for the past 6 months (by crossposting to both services) but several other factors prompted me to effect a full move.

• Mark Coatney’s move to join Tumblr is one sign that the format is being taken seriously as a place to publish writing on the web.
• Despite being an academic blog my posts are usually accompanied by an illustrating photograph. Tumblr’s handling of photos, quotations, and links makes it easy to mix photos and short extracts from articles in with longer pieces.
• I don’t always have access to a rich text (HTML) email editor, such as when I am using the iPad.
• Encountering the stellar Wordographic theme on American Drink.
• One last word: Markdown.

There are one or two things missing in the move. The most important is comments. Posterous did them out of the box. Here I’ll have to set up something like Disqus—if I decide to have comments at all. I’d love to hear your thoughts.