Now Reading
Tumblr — Lifestreaming . . . One day I’ll stream where I want to.

Tumblr — Lifestreaming . . . One day I’ll stream where I want to.

Here I am. Floating away. Eveything I do is a river of life.

First it was that my little writing blog had a feed. RSS what was that? Really Simple Syndication. Then I joined a social networking, or was it a social media site? I don’t know.

But it had a river of news about what everyone was doing.

Now along comes Tumblr.

tumblr

Steve Rubel has a great description of lifestreaming and how he is using it.

I have set up a tumblelog at my personal domain at www.steverubel.com. It rolls up my blog, del.icio.us links, Flickr, Facebook notes and Twitter tweets all in one place. You can subscribe to the feed here. Also, there’s a mobile version. Next step: turning my lifestream into a Steve Rubel widget.

I really like that there is a single place attached to my name that rolls up all of the content that I am publishing online. I also like that in just a couple of clicks I can set up a river of news that I can share at the domain of my choosing. This can become a very powerful concept. For example, I could use either my existing tumblelog or a new one at a sub domain to roll up all of your content – such as @steverubel tweets on Twitter or in-bound inks to my various blogs.

I heard about it first from Easton Ellsworth who suggested that

Lifestreams are simple to implement and, I think, extremely useful. You could create a public lifestream for friends and followers to track. Or you could make a private lifestream for you own record-keeping. Web feeds obviate the need to visit various locales around the Web to find out what a person has been up to lately.

So I thought on a Saturday, this might be worth a try a life stream of my own. Getting started way simpler than starting my first blog post. I just punched in my feed addresses to my three blogs and there they were. Ah, but to put them on my www.lizstrauss.com URL was a little trickier.

When I punched in my domain name I got this answer.

This domain’s A-record is not pointing to Tumblr. It is currently set to “www.lizstrauss.com/”.

See Also
part-time work

Please contact your domain registrar for support. Our staff is absolutely unable to assist with DNS configuration.

You can find more information on setting up a custom domain on Tumblr here.

I’m not sure what it means, but it sounds like a hassle. Doesn’t that just seem the way with my lifestream? Oh Go figure.

I’ll be living now on tumblr . . . you can find it all together at http://lizstrauss.tumblr.com/

One day I’ll live on my own URL, then I’ll stream where I want to.

Until then I’ll be floating away on tumblr.

View Comments (17)
  • Hi Liz, in the little free time I have I am trying to prepare a WP theme optimized for streaming.

    You can use one of the feed importer plugins to get everything at one domain.

  • Thanks for the shove, I looked at Tumblr a few months ago, and didn’t quite get it. I looked again this morning, and it’s like a light went on. I took one of my unused domains, pointed it to Tumblr, points tumblr to a bunch of my blogs, and viola! My unused domain now has a lot of stuff on it. I need to gather together my other info and get it integrated there as well. Tumblr doesn’t support Zooomr yet, just Flckr.

    http://www.michaelclark.org is the domain I moved over to Tumblr. Updated DNS may still be propagating around the web.

  • Hi Liz, I read about tumblr at the same time I was trying to work out what to do with all this amazing stuff I kept on finding and reading – without all that stuff getting in the way of my intention to keep my blog writing going with purpose and direction.

    I’m experimenting with tumblr as a way to add short and sweet snippets – quotes, ideas, links, good posts – as well as my own material. It means I can come back to it if I want to turn it into a post ‘proper’ but meantime have got it out of my head – and in a place where someone else could read it if they don’t have anything better to do!

    Joanna

  • “Our staff is absolutely unable to assist with DNS configuration.”

    Awww, I can imagine the poor soul sat alone in an office all by him/herself, muttering about the number of people who send in DNS configuration requests when he/she has so much other work to do, being the only staff. :)

  • Hi Michael,
    I was going to put it on one of my unused domains the other night. I even had the help of a friend. But I was so blow away tired. I couldn’t get my head around which buttons to click. :)

  • Hey Joanna!
    I’m hoping to add more variety to the tumblr stream — make it like a vacation trip down river for a day away from the blog. :)

  • Hi Andy!
    If it was someone like me — clueless — calling I can totally understand, but I think they probably should have planned for that. :)

  • What a great find Liz. I was looking for something different than a blog. More than delicious. A private place where I could dump links to subjects I want to blog about later, with notes attached. Better than a folder or bookmarks even.

    A place to fight information overload.

  • I’ve only been on Tumblr for a few days but I’m really enjoying it. Posting from a mobile phone is fun too, and it keeps my blog focussed on the topic I guess most people are reading it for.

    With the ‘A’ record, it’s pretty simple. I logged into the control panel where I registered the domain, and under the DNS settings changed the IP Address to the one Tumblr provides. A few hours later I punched the domain in on tumblr.com (where that message comes up about pointing somewhere else) and it worked a treat.

Scroll To Top