While I don’t tweet as heavily as many of the people I follow, I often have thoughts and ideas to share. Except these thoughts are hard to state succinctly. I’m an advocate of omitting useless words, which should mean composing succinct tweets would be easy. Then I again I naturally ramble, often getting sidetracked within one sentence discussing another topic or at least backstory such as how I started this post weeks ago and only returned when I wanted to write a completely different post on the topic of not blogging enough. Oh wait, where was I? WordPress is a great tool, and I’ve used it numerous times to build up websites, replacing older systems such as Textile. This current design was built around a Tumblr feed, but I abandoned that feed in lieu of WordPress. Of course I actually wasn’t using Tumblr and my feed was not being updated.

This is a long preamble to say, I like WordPress and Twitter but I’m just not using them here. Excuses, excuses, I keep busy with other projects such as my random movie picker Flixflip. Or there’s my iPhone app blog Tappick that I have just rebooted to focus on app design patterns. And of course there’s an idea that germinated last summer and which has finally been able to go live as Don’t Forget About with the considerable work of my co-founder Joel. This means I don’t have much time to blog random thoughts. Tweeting is so much easier to do and because of the short format and time it take, there’s no mental barrier to hold me back. But tweets are also too short. Sometimes I want to comment on a link, something longer than a tweet but shorter than this blog, a paragraph in other words.

Finally getting around to the headline. I don’t consider Twitter micro-blogging. It’s micro-micro-blogging, and also because of the platform, ecosystem and manner in which we consume tweets, it has become a different animal. Twitter has also become a public SMS platform for communicating, so the conversation is quite indifferent indeed. Tumblr is still something more appropriately worth calling micro-blogging. But somehow I feel restrained for a number of reasons. The API allows me to present my feed here, though I question the value of duplicating the content in two places and how Google’s happy little bots perceive this. There are apps for updating Tumblr content easily and on the go. Again this should be an opportunity, but it feels like a barrier. I’m not as in control of my data and the conversation. So what I am looking for is a micro-blogging solution between Twitter, Tumblr/Posterous and WordPress. And possibly I want to make it myself, customised to my needs.

There it is, the essence of my post. I want a micro-blogging solution fit for my needs. Also, I want to redesign this site. Again. That’s ridiculous frankly. I’m busy with enough blogs and other projects, oh and work. But then again when I built this site it was to fit one particular need as the type of designer I was at the time, focused on editorial design. My other sites are expressions of a desire to try out different designs. This site should therefore either be consistent or simple and barebones enough to allow me to experiment. When I find time.