On “mangatars,” context-aware blog posts and the “great” idea failing in the execution phase

From: FaceYourManga.com | Shake Yourself!

About once every two months or so I get asked about the application that I used to make my avatar, and every time I fumble and takes me an hour or so to dig around until I find it. These are called mangatars, here is a big version of mine:

This was generated with a free tool at http://faceyourmanga.com/ but in order to have the full size version (much bigger than what I am showing here), I had to pay them a tiny amount of money, I don’t think it was more than a couple dollars. Oh, and it is not a magical conversion that you feed it a photo and out comes the finished avatar. Instead I had to build it by hand, so I am still shocked more than two years later that I was able to hit it so close to reality.

I am posting it here so the next time I am asked about it, which sure as hell is going to happen in about two months from now, at least it will come up in the search results. When I tried to search for this in my Tumblr archives, it never came up, I had to page through the archivals one month at a time.

If anyone at Tumblr is reading this: guys, I love you tons, and you have the superior PRODUCT, but your execution really sucks. I am confident that the product IS superior, and I believe that making blog posts context-sensitive is a brilliant move and that within one major release both Blogger and Wordpress will eventually copy this feature. The sad part is the execution, I simply can’t stand not being able to access my blog. I am willing to pay good money if I know that availability and performance are going to be better. Right now I have to choose between using Tumblr for free and using Blogger/Blogspot for free, and Tumblr simply can’t match this in terms of infrastructure and performance under heavy loads. Sorry.

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