notes.husk.org

A selection of the strings available as Dashboard...

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 18:02:52 +0000

A selection of the strings available as Dashboard highlights (only $1 each!) in Tumblr.

"The first thing you do when you take a piece of paper is always put the date on it, the month, the..."

Tue, 28 Jun 2011 01:40:54 +0100

“The first thing you do when you take a piece of paper is always put the date on it, the month, the day, and where it is. Because every idea that you put on paper is useful to you. By putting the date on it as a habit, when you look for what you wrote down in your notes, you will be desperate to know that it happened in April in 1972 and it was in Paris and already it begins to be useful.”

- Francis Ford Coppola: On Risk, Money, Craft & Collaboration (via deathbeard)

I keep thinking that I’ve drummed this point home, but perhaps not, so: it still amazes me that almost everything we do online has a timestamp (if not two), and yet services are so bad about exposing them, and especially about using them as a way to organise your stuff.

Flickr has a calendar view (which perhaps isn’t as obvious as it should be, but it’s there). Tumblr has dated archives, even if they only show you them at a crude resolution. Elsewhere, though? Barely anything. Sigh.

"Whenever you post to another site or profile, Tumblr can automatically import your posts to your..."

Wed, 22 Jun 2011 18:43:17 +0100

“Whenever you post to another site or profile, Tumblr can automatically import your posts to your Tumblr blog (via RSS).”

- Why Everyone Loves Tumblr. See also.

"In order to conserve our resources, Tumblr is no longer supporting feed imports on blogs that have..."

Wed, 22 Jun 2011 18:24:00 +0100

“In order to conserve our resources, Tumblr is no longer supporting feed imports on blogs that have not already imported feeds in the past. We deeply regret any inconvenience that this may cause. But, this change will allow us to focus our resources and energy on other useful Tumblr features.”

- Tumblr support, quoted by Stephan. More: Tumblr removes RSS import.

It might be time to write my own RSS to Tumblr API code. Sigh.

"The staff is up to 28 now, nine of whom are engineers."

Mon, 25 Apr 2011 21:35:27 +0100

“The staff is up to 28 now, nine of whom are engineers.”

- Adrianne Jeffries in This Is Why Your Tumblr’s Down. As iamdanw comments:

9? That’s it? They must be very sleep deprived

… and that’s now. It was even fewer in December.

"Tumblr even lost cofounder Marco Arment, who left in September to focus on his already-profitable..."

Mon, 25 Apr 2011 21:35:00 +0100

“Tumblr even lost cofounder Marco Arment, who left in September to focus on his already-profitable start-up Instapaper.”

- Adrianne Jeffries, in This Is Why Your Tumblr’s Down (via iamdanw). If I were a sensationalist journalist, I’d also be asking why nobody’s noted that his blog is no longer hosted at Tumblr. (However, it looks like the Instapaper blog still is.)

(Of course, there are many reasons to move a site. Hell, I have friends who rewrite entire blog engines every week for a laugh. Still…)

tumblr.com/explore/film

Fri, 04 Mar 2011 02:52:00 +0000

Films seem to be particularly well suited to having Tumblr blogs dedicated to them.

I’ve been following Movies in Frames for what feels like ages. “One movie - four frames. That’s it.”. The quality is a little variable, but it’s generally well worth following.

If We Don’t, Remember Me is newer, but possibly even better. Short, looping animated GIFs (the web’s native art form?) Have a look.

Newer yet is Behind My Back, which takes stills where you’re invited to share the viewpoint of the film’s protagonists.

Finally, and a new find today, is Movie Barcode, which turns every film into a single image, recording the predominant colours throughout.

Enjoy browsing their respective archives.

mwunsch: Tumblr spammers are kind of creepy. And, apparently,...

Thu, 27 Jan 2011 17:49:58 +0000

mwunsch:

Tumblr spammers are kind of creepy. And, apparently, French.

They’ve got a bit cleverer since the days of insurance-mutelle-ligne or whoever, but the thing I’m confused with about these strange default-theme reblog-only Tumblrs is- what are they actually selling? Is this just a PageRank exercise? Isn’t that kind of lame nowadays?

Ah well. Maybe I’ll just switch off the display of notes on my theme. Perhaps they’ll go away then.

Anti-Attribution Tumblrs: A Complaint

Thu, 20 Jan 2011 16:53:27 +0000

I’ve noticed a couple of Tumblr blogs recently that use images posted in the Text post type, rather than the Photo type. This is particularly annoying when you’re trying to determine image attribution.

Generally I run across them through ffffound. Here’s an example: it’s a nice picture, but I want to credit it more thoroughly than just linking to the blog on which everyone saw it. I head over to the Tumblr and open the archive page, and I get this:

This is useless for scanning for an image. Thankfully tools like TinEye exist, which let me find the actual site that hosted the original image.

Of course, Tumblr somewhat encourages other anti-attribution patterns: images being reposted to ffffound from people’s dashboards is one of the more obvious ones. Still, it’d be nice if people avoided adding to them.

Permanence, Discoverability, and Control

Sat, 08 Jan 2011 22:26:00 +0000

I stumbled upon this post by quietbabylon, called “For Sufficiently Small Values of ‘Permanent’”, which I’ve chosen to sum up with these paragraphs:

Anil Dash’s post is about the importance of putting your clever/important ideas in a medium other than Twitter. Quick summary: There are a lot of good ideas in circulation on Twitter, but if you don’t put them somewhere like a blog, they are liable to be lost forever.

Blogs used to be the poster children of ephemera. It took the rise of even more ephemeral media (status updates and Twitter posts) for blogs to seem permanent. But blogs are no more permanent today than they were five or ten years ago. See also: dead Geocities, dying Delicious, and constantly ailing Tumblr.

What blogs and website have that Twitter lacks is rediscoverability. Twitter’s search is incomplete, missing what I’d think were basic things like searching a person’s timeline or limiting the scope to a list of accounts. On top of that, while the posts aren’t lost, we do lose the ability to search past 3,200 posts into the past—I needed Google to find that Dorsey tweet.

This is true, and far from unimportant, but there’s another thing that blogs tend to have that Twitter doesn’t: control.

If you own (although as the post notes, they’re strictly rented for a period from one to ten years) your own URL, and have a copy of your data, then you have a lot of control over your site. That’s most obviously true for a self-hosted Movable Type or Wordpress account, where you have the database and can edit the software yourself, but it’s also true even for Tumblr or Blogger. When Vox shut down, I lost control over the blech.vox.com domain, whereas if and when Tumblr closes, I can repoint the notes.husk.org cname to somewhere else, and (providing I can either replicate or redirect the /posts/id mapping) nobody will be able to notice the difference. (This isn’t just hypothetical, either: Tom Insam recently posted code that did just that.)

Discoverability is certainly important (and Tumblr’s archive pages are generally good for this), but a certain level of control is useful too.