tumblstuff

wow tumblr kind of sucks now like seriously people are so judgmental here and the hate if you say anything is just OUT OF THIS WORLD.

Conversations on Tumblr aren’t like conversations anywhere else. You can’t just leave a comment on someone else’s post. You have to bring that post, wholesale, over to your own blog, before adding your piece to the bottom of it. Good reblog commentary, in any context, sets off a whole new cycle of reblogging, sending a whole new set of conversations rolling around Tumblr, all of them picking up new comments as they go. It’s like a Katamari.

Transformative commentary in a reblog can completely change the meaning of a post. Old posts are rediscovered, already-weird posts get transcendentally weird. 

But there were oddities with the way this commentary was presented.

These blocks of content get smaller as the conversation grows, which in turn increases the distance between the names of the users and whatever they said. It eventually makes the whole thing tricky to figure out—especially in the mobile app, where most people use Tumblr. If you enjoy someone’s commentary midway down a deep reblog tree, you probably aren’t going to follow that thin gray line back to the top of the post to find out who said it. Worse, deep conversations were being pushed completely off the post, effectively shutting them down.

There are charms to that chaos, but ultimately it can make Tumblr hard to approach for new people, and leaves posts vulnerable to being consumed by their own popularity. 

So, how do you bring clarity to the reading experience while maintaining the constructive sensibility of reblog conversations? Turns out, a solution to this “who said what?” problem has existed since the creation of online chat. Simply listing the comments one after another was the first way it was done on the Plato Talkomatic, the grandfather of online chat, and it remains the clearest and easiest to read. 

Initially we tried preserving the indentation of the original design by insetting the stack in a frame.

Trouble was, it meant that we were losing a tremendous amount of space for people to play with in the context of the reblog. Particularly on small screens, where space is already at a premium, we didn’t want to cut into space for creative responses with images, text, or literally whatever. 

At the same time, we played around with including avatars next to commentary. Not only did it further clarify who said what, but it gave people a better chance of being recognized for adding something thoughtful or funny to a conversation. 

In the end, we combined our favorite parts of the two of these, hoisting the avatar and username up above the commentary. It allowed us to include a little more interesting detail about the who-said-what, and give people as much space as possible to say anything they like. It also actually reduced the height of very long chains.

Ultimately, creative discourse is one of the things we love most about Tumblr. It’s a big part of the reason we’re all here. The mechanic that fuels that—posts being literally passed from blog to blog—isn’t going anywhere.

Clever new button on certain posts. Here’s how you get it:

Find something you love on Etsy, Artsy, Kickstarter, or DoSomething.

Post it to Tumblr. 

That’s it. You were done at step two. 

Now your followers are one click closer to the thing you’re showing them. Neat. 

windyvanity:

How to Download Videos off of Tumblr

Go to the post that contains the video

Right click on the upper right corner of the post and click on “Open link in new tab” as seen in the 1st picture

Right click on the video and click “View page source”

At the page source, highlight the line of code beginning with http:// (Tumblr User Name) .tumblr.com/ as seen in the 2nd picture

Copy the URL and paste it into your browser URL

Go to the URL

Right click on the video and click “Save video as…”

Now you can rename the video and save it as an mp4 file (video).

edit: I forgot to include an essential step

For trending topics in social media, check out quepoppa, created by bluechoochoo. The site tracks trends for Tumblr (including a top Tumblr GIF), Google Search, YouTube, Twitter, Vine and Google Plus. Trends come in live, refreshing automatically.

It’s been stuck in HTML-editing mode for about a year

Now it’s stopped filling out the source section in quote posts

This is huge. Today, President Obama himself has come out in favor of a number of clear, specific, and firm net neutrality rules that will keep the internet free and open. We couldn’t be more thrilled. Give yourselves credit for this one. Tumblr users have been out in front of this issue all year. 130,000 of you called Congress in a single day. You showed Washington and the FCC what democracy looks like—it looks like the internet. You made your voice heard, and the President was listening. The specifics of the matter: Obama has called for the reclassification of broadband service providers under Title II, which means the FCC can hold them to the same sensible rules that telephone companies are regulated through. This means—and this is directly from the President—that there can be no blocking, no throttling, no paid prioritization, and that the rules will cover mobile, too. To sum it up in a couple words: Fuck yeah. One last thing: we’re almost at the finish line, but we’re not quite there yet. It’s vitally important that the FCC, in light of the president’s announcement, act to issue these rules (and not any of the weaker, riskier proposals that are in consideration) during their December meeting. We need immediate action. In the meantime, our policy team will be taking your concerns directly to the FCC, and you can keep updated on any further actions you can take by following themediafix and fight4future.