Mission 2; Blog 2

Final Product

As our final product we settled on creating and managing a blog each on three separate and different platforms, each focusing on a different topic. After spending some time researching my chosen platform, Tumblr, I decided to create a "Generic" Anime Blog as to emulate the blogging style I had already seen on the platform and to accommodate the social media functionalities of the platform.

As soon as I began creating posts for Tumblr, I encountered it's multiple posting formats which was completely integrated into it's content creation. Unlike other platforms that have a posting function which allow you to create your own format to suit the post, Tumblr has several pre-made formats for a variety of posts which is quite unique to the platform. I set out to explore each format and create at least one post with each.

Text

The first format I tested was the Text Post which was pretty straightforward. This format is just the standard blog post format with the option to embed pictures, videos, or GIFs. I decided to engage this format a little more than the others due to it's simplicity thus I chose to do a review style post in an attempt to test out as many features of the text format as I could.

Photo

When testing the Photo format I found that it was quite similar to the Text format with the minor difference that a photo upload was obviously required for the post and it became the main aspect of the post with the post's dimensions made to fit the photo and the photos quality being preserved.

Quote

Sticking to the anime theme of the blog I decided to use a quote from an anime for my test post in the Quote format. This format was quite unique and very specialised for this specific type of content. It seemed that this format specifically was tailored toward the more Social Media aspect of the platform due to it's concise nature. 

Chat

Similar to the Quote format, the Chat format also seemed very specific and specialised for the Social Media side of the platform due to it's concise nature. Interestingly this format automatically formatted your text to the pre-determined specifications such as the line spacing and bolding of letters. Though it could be used to formally record a conversation I found that it was most commonly used for more casual or meme uses thus I chose to emulate this when testing my own post.

Audio

While testing the Audio format I found that it seemed to be quite interesting and had a lot of potential but had some understandable limitations. Obviously like my other posts, this post was about anime music but that then added the challenge of finding these songs within Tumblr's limited song pool which consisted of a seemingly random assortment of songs from different sources such as Spotify and Soundcloud for Copyright reasons.

Video

The Video format was, in my opinion, the best and most seamless format to use. Similar to the Photo format this format required a video to become the primary aspect of the post but unlike the Audio format it didn't have quite as strict copyright restrictions with the ability to upload either local videos or video links. I found my content had become a little more formal than I intended due to the test nature of the posts so I decided to us a comedy video from the anime community as the test for this format.

Customisation

To fully immerse myself into my blog I decided to pay close attention to the customisation of my blog to really make it my own. Though Tumblr's customisation seems quite simplistic at first it reveals itself to be quite robust if you explore the customisation options such as when I found the experimental Tumblr Labs settings as seen below.

Presentation

With all of my testing completed I then compiled the information I had collected and condensed them as best I could into the slide format that my partner Julia had used as to create a more cohesive presentation. This unfortunately led to me cutting a lot of information and detail from my slides.