the new mini donk in the family, originally uploaded by slopjop.

I’m experimenting with mini-blogging.

Sometimes I come across items that I want to highlight or preserve or comment on but that I don’t want to write a whole post about. Maybe I have little more to say than to point the item out; maybe I have no more than a pithy comment; or maybe I’m too pressed for time to do more than remark on a trend.

For times such as these, people often use mini-blogs, which are generally just links with small commentary. Some people use deli.cio.us to capture these, so I’ve tried that but I didn’t like leaving all formatting and images behind.

Now I’m trying a Tumblr blog. What I like is that it has easy-to-use tools for writing short posts that consist of simply one link, one video, one picture, or one thought. It seems easy as well to post from a cellphone. So it’s like a cross between a full blog, Twitter, and deli.cio.us. Perfect.

What I don’t like is that it seems to offer no commenting feature. Comments are a big part of what I love about blogging, so this is a big setback.

Maybe I just haven’t figured the comments out, or maybe another mini-blogging tool has the convenience of Tumblr plus comments. If so, that service will rule.

I’m goign to come up with a better way to integrate the mini-blog posts with the main blog posts. I’m certain there’s a WordPress plugin. And I’ll also blend the mini-blog posts into the site feed, or offer a menu of feeds so you can decide which kinds of items you like.

In the meantime, please view the RSS of the mini-blog in the right-hand sidebar of the site, or visit it directly at http://cynthiacloskey.tumblr.com/. There’s an RSS feed there of course.

If you’ve played with mini-blogging or have a tool to recommend, I’d love to hear about it.

OK: enough meta discussion. On with the blogging!

UPDATE (3/18): I liked the Tumblr interface and ease of use, but I felt uncomfortable having separate sites and I missed comments terribly. After a brief hunt, I found a WordPress plugin called QuickPost that offers a Tumblr-like interface but puts the posts directly into this blog. Sweet. I’ve been using that for a few days and am pleased. So I went back and (tediously) brought the Tumblr posts into this blog for posterity. Maybe I’ll use Tumblr for something else, but for now my blogging output is streeamlined again.

I see that several others have started up with Tumblr in the meantime. I like how people are experimenting — quite cool. Please post a link in the comments if you want to show off.