notes.husk.org. scribblings by Paul Mison.

Watching For Attribution

bojo:

So, apparently this picture got picked up by the world we live in and is now doing the rounds. Great!

Only trouble is that Tumblr makes it really hard to know this stuff is being shared. It’s only because I saw an unusual amount of activity that I went into my Flickr stats and discovered that it had more than 500 notes from other Tumblrs! Surely there’s a better way for me to know what’s happening to my stuff? Can’t somebody join the dots?

Hm. Once you know something is on Tumblr, tracking it is easy: likes and reblogs tend to show up in templates, and if they don’t, there’s the API (or the Dashboard) to see. From that point of view it’s better than Twitter, where you get no visibility on favourites, although it’s probably only on a par with Flickr, which has the aforementioned stats for pro users, and Recent Activity (including showing who faved things) for everyone.

For the larger point, though, I suppose there might be a programmatic way of doing that. Google’s profile (based, I believe, on link rel=me data) knows that I have husk.org, flickr.com/photos/blech and notes.husk.org, and so Tumblr could (if they were so inclined) notify me on my dashboard if something from any of them were linked to.

I can imagine it taking quite a lot of niggly (and hard-to-scale) code, and things would probably still fall through the gaps, but it might be a nice thing for Tumblr to do to counter the perception that it’s just about the mindless reblogging.

Rich Feeds for Tumblr Blogs

benw:

the RSS output from Tumblr stinks. I assume it’s an evil incentive to use the Dashboard.

So, I’ve written a feed script. It’s called Tumblfeed, which sounds like tumbleweed… which I suppose is a metaphor for the semantic desolation of the Tumblr RSS feeds… or something. It was an accidental rhyme.

This looks good. I may even start offering feeds of my stuff through it.

Per-tag RSS feeds for Tumblr

I didn’t think that Tumblr offered per-tag RSS feeds, but after spending some time trying to hack the JSON output from the Tumblr API into my aggregated front page, I tried appending “/rss” to the URL of one of my tag archive pages, and somewhat to my surprise, it worked.

Of course, RSS is more useful if it’s discoverable, so in addition to the standard

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml"
title="All items (RSS)" href="{RSS}"/>

I’ve added

{block:TagPage}<link rel="alternate" 
 type="application/rss+xml" title="Items with this tag (RSS)"
 href="/tagged/{Tag}/rss"/> {/block:TagPage}

The second line uses Tumblr’s custom themes, in particular the {block:TagPage} element, to only advertise the RSS feed (through the standard autodiscovery syntax) on tag archive pages. This is in addition to the standard feed; you can decide between them thanks to the descriptive titles.

If you use tags and a custom theme, think about adding the same: it might help people who want to follow a particular subject.

Still Wireless

A week or so ago Tumblr launched their new Wire feature, which was more like Radar (which old-time (ie six month old) users might remember) than the Popular pages that it replaced. I wrote that I didn’t like it.

Since writing that, I’ve occasionally glanced at the page, but compared to the two or three times a day (at least) that I used to look at it, and the now-gone popular/upcoming page, that’s pretty small beer. So, well done Tumblr! I’m now confined to my insular little backwater.

Meanwhile, Posterous imported my Tumblr theme with no trouble. Jumping ship never looked so straightforward.

Wireless

Going on the reaction to the staff post announcing Tumblr Wire, I’m the only person who took an instant dislike to it. It’s the worst of Radar, back. Where’s Recent / Popular / Upcoming gone? Bah. I demand a refund. (Yes, I know Tumblr’s free. That’s called irony. Or sarcasm. Or something.)

Having spent a little more time with it: I still hate it. That scrolling box has zero refindability. Good luck if you want to actually capture anything from it. You thought Twitter had the memory span of a goldfish? Man, that’s like writing in stone compared to this.

On the other hand, maybe I’m just not Tumblr’s desired audience. I write posts of more than two paragraphs; perhaps I should just give up and shuffle off to Posterous. Or ignore all the social crap beyond the Dashboard. At least then I’d only have one source of pseudo-meaningful bollocks.

Edit: Oh dear, it’s even worse. Links from the Wire go through the Digg-bar style tumblupon UI, which has nasty framesets stopping you from easily sharing stuff. Nasty.