Wow. I have to say…this is really cool. I LOVE Tumblr, but if I had found Chyrp first, I’m not sure which I would have chosen. For anyone who is even a little bit of a control freak (which I tend to be), Chyrp seems like a fantastic alternative. It does nearly everything Tumblr does, and then adds a whole bunch of other cool abilities to the mix, and let’s you manage it on your own server.

Don’t get me wrong…the simplicity and ultra-ease of Tumblr is what drew me to it in the first place. I truly love that about it and don’t plan on switching any time soon. But Chyrp let’s someone (if they want to) add pages, add users, add groups, activate and deactivate different modules and plugins (“Feathers”), and also allow comments on posts. 

I personally would see no reason for MOST people who want an easy lightweight blog, and who are desirous of more than the bare minimum that Tumblr offers, to use Wordpress or Textpattern or any of the others over Chyrp. It really seems to be an almost perfect hybrid of a strict tumblelog and an old-school blog. If at some point I decided that I needed “more” from my meager tumblelog, I’d start up a Chyrp-powered version in a heartbeat. 

Kudos to Alex Suraci. Very nicely done.  

(As an aside…I think Tumblr could take a few good ideas from this product. There are some really great ideas at play, and some of them could — at least it seems to me — still work within the Tumblr model.

…And I will say this: the community aspect of Tumblr IS really their most unique feature, and something that I don’t think Chyrp could compete with—at least without some serious and interesting innovation. So Tumblr will always have that. Although, clearly, that is not what a Chyrp user is using Chyrp for.)