Daily insights for city builders, delivered every morning at 6 AM ET. I’m Brandon Donnelly — a Toronto-based real estate developer and founder of Globizen. I’ve been writing here since 2013.

Bye Tumblr. Hi WordPress.

I finally did it. Over the weekend I ported this blog over from Tumblr to WordPress. I had been thinking about doing this for a while, but kept putting it off (1) because of the work involved and (2) because I was worried about my permalinks changing. About 35-40% of the visits to this blog come from organic search. I’m on the first page when you Google “real estate developer.”

I had been using Tumblr since I first started writing this daily blog back in August 2013. But it started feeling increasingly limited. It isn’t great for longish-form blogs like this one and it is terrible at handling photos and other embedded content. (I plan to post more of my photography now.) The last straw for me was the inability to blog from a mobile device. I tried that over the weekend and it was bad.

I was also starting to feel like the product was on the decline. Yahoo acquired Tumblr in 2013 for $1.1 billion. Tumblr hadn’t yet figured out how to effectively monetize its platform and Yahoo needed a cool social product in their portfolio. But that deal doesn’t seem to have gone as planned, at least not for Yahoo.

So here I am on WordPress. I’m still working out some of the kinks, but I think we’re almost there. If you’re reading this post in your inbox, it should be business as usual. If you’re reading this post on the web, you’ll notice a few differences (I’m still fine tuning the design).

Regularly scheduled programming will resume tomorrow now that we’re just about setup.

11 responses to “Bye Tumblr. Hi WordPress.”

  1. sleye Avatar

    Loving the new website design (and that it’s much more mobile friendly). Any plans to make the email responsive to mobile screen sizes as well? Love reading your newsletter every day!

    1. Brandon Graham Donnelly Avatar

      thanks!

      the newsletter should be mobile optimized. what’s happening on your end?

  2. Trebecca Avatar

    Thank you for doing this, lol. It’s about time 🙂 Looks nice!!

    1. Brandon Graham Donnelly Avatar
  3. Max Vo Avatar
    Max Vo

    Good job Brandon. I look forward to seeing more of your photography.

  4. Esteban Avatar

    Much Better looking Brandon!

    1. Brandon Graham Donnelly Avatar

      Thanks! Sounds like this was an overdue change.

  5. Jeffrey Gordon Avatar
    Jeffrey Gordon

    Brandon, love your blog, must be great to now be a WordPress user, my coder types all recommend it for the average publisher, all the plugins and support community are dynamic in comparison to anything Yahoo is doing these days! Open Source Baby!

    1. Brandon Graham Donnelly Avatar

      thanks jeffrey! i am really glad i made the switch. now i wish it hadn’t taken me so long 😉

  6. […] so at the beginning of this year I said goodbye to Tumblr and switched this daily blog over to WordPress. A big part of that decision had to do with the fact […]

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