Deprecating New XKit
Hi all, it's been a while!
tl;dr: You should use XKit Rewritten, it's new, shiny, and getting consistent updates. Get it from here: https://addons.tumblr.com/post/661324873572974592/xkit-rewritten. If you want to customize the appearance of Tumblr you should use the built-in settings or Palettes for Tumblr. You shouldn't rely on New XKit, it's old and busted.
Around four years ago, April, a core contributor to New XKit, started the XKit Rewritten and wider @addons projects to create a modern alternative to the already somewhat moldy New XKit. This was with our complete support, and many members of the New XKit team now also help out with XKit Rewritten and other addons.
Chrome and Firefox have both phased out support for older extensions, requiring challenging workarounds to install New XKit. It's become very clear that anyone who is still using New XKit would really have a better time using XKit Rewritten, Palettes and Outbox for Tumblr, and the couple XKit-inspired core Tumblr features.
If you continue to use New XKit for some key part of your Tumblr workflow be warned that it's past the end of its digital lifespan. Despite the name, New XKit is a crumbling old cathedral. You can still walk around in it if you really want to, but it has been fenced off for safety and a brick might fall on your head.
One key difference we'd like to highlight is that XKit Rewritten intentionally doesn't have a Blacklist feature, leaving it to Tumblr's native post filtering functionality. If you still need the specific functionality of New XKit's Blacklist, you can keep it installed alongside XKit Rewritten. Click here for a list of other frequently asked questions.
To summarize: Get XKit Rewritten here: https://addons.tumblr.com/post/661324873572974592/xkit-rewritten. It's like New XKit but designed for modern Tumblr and consistently updated. New XKit will still be around for anyone who really needs it but is a much buggier experience.
Thank you all very much for using New XKit! On behalf of the whole team it's been a great time with all of you here on [tumblr].
With New XKit officially riding off into the sunset, I’m taking this opportunity to have a nice maudlin ramble about my time with XKit. The past ten years have been a fantastic journey filled with so much learning and growth. Thank you to all the volunteers and users who made New XKit possible. Read on for the story of how a bit of badgering and the nerdiest long-distance relationship resulted in an open source software project used by almost half a million people.
In the far-off year of 2015, my girlfriend (now wife :)) came to me and said, "hey, I'm having trouble with XKit because nobody is maintaining it. you love javascript and open source so you should do something." Being a fool, I agreed and dove in alongside her. What we found were 41,238 lines of nearly-comment-free code that was a little obtuse and poorly formatted before nine months of bitrot had peppered bugs throughout it. Which is to say, it was only a little worse than the code I was already working with (and sometimes creating) as an undergraduate.
Working with all the power of two bored nerds, my girlfriend and I fixed the most major problems with the code, spun up our own hosting, and created our own extensions: Anti-Capitalism and Lethe, respectively (our priorities perhaps revealing a bit about who we are as people). We registered a new blog, @new-xkit-extension, and made our first post announcing that we had working builds of XKit that you could install with a bit of know-how.
This post blew up! It turns out that the lovely people of Tumblr were absolutely foaming at the mouth for someone to get any form of XKit working so we were inundated with asks thanking us for our efforts (at this point quite minimal!), wondering when we'd have a normal XKit build out, and reporting problems with our developer build. All of this filled us with determination. We spent unhealthy amounts of time over the next few days fixing bugs and nurturing the fledgling project.
After only a couple days we would be graced with the most important event of the whole project--one that sets the stage for what made all of this worth it. We got our first contributor, @xumbra! A random stranger saw us frantically patching all the holes in XKit and stepped up to help. If there’s one thing I’d like you to get out of this meandering tale, it’s that people can come together through a spirit of helpfulness to create a better world. Or, in this case, a better way to reblog posts.
One week, one contributor, and five thousand (!!) followers later, we entered a very hectic period of devoting an unreasonable amount of time to making New XKit the best it could be. The love language of both my girlfriend and I was officially JavaScript. One highlight from these early days is the time when we had to make a post to clarify that, despite all the bugs we were still frantically fixing, the invisible notes were @staff’s fault, not ours. We also decided to base our blog’s theme around Kill La Kill. While this is presumably my fault, I have no idea why this felt like a good idea. Speaking of ideas that seemed good at the time, we saw that the ability to edit reblogs was being removed and introduced an extension to keep them around. This extension got a lot of people to use New XKit and was beloved by the RP community but it was an absolute nightmare to maintain. In return for this bit of ill-advised hackery, we got to make a fun meme, so it’s all worth it in the end. These early days also saw some stumbles! The all caps DON’T UPDATE ON FIREFOX is an iconic example of the long path towards stability ahead of us. We also gained several members on the New XKit crew! As our growth exploded, it became clearer and clearer that we were in need of some process and professionalism.
Thus began a heart-racing montage of dotting i’s and crossing t’s. The growing New XKit team split out support and shitposting from the main blog, freeing it up to be used for important announcements. We also created a live support channel and started using project management software. After a short fundraising campaign, we even scraped together the money for an iOS development certificate and would soon extend our support to every major browser. Thank you to all the generous people who helped! This is also around the time when @staff would change the reblog layout, banishing the vertical discourse lines...until we brought them back with a new extension. It had only been half a year since we set out on this journey. New XKit was becoming a proper community-driven open source software project with around 300,000 users all customizing their Tumblr experience. At this point, we put together a whole discord-hosted town hall event where the whole team spent four and half hours straight hashing out ways to further improve the project and answering community questions. It was a testament to how engaged and improvement-hungry our crew was and it warms my heart to this day. It also keeps me humble; because wow, past me had some Very Wrong software development opinions. Luckily, the New XKit team was (and is) full of super knowledgeable people and we continued on a good course. Hell, unbeknownst to us, our newest team member, @april, would go on to be the best addon developer on all of Tumblr. All was at peace and New XKit was properly “less broken than you think.”
Unfortunately, this golden age couldn’t last forever. Five years after the start of New XKit, the React dash came to crash the party. This complete rewrite of Tumblr’s frontend was a massive improvement in terms of future engineering and modernity, but New XKit had wrapped around Tumblr’s old code like a parasitic vine and would take irreparable damage from being disentangled. In simple terms, nearly every extension broke overnight. With @staff’s help, we were able to mitigate some of the damage, but the writing was on the wall. Most of New XKit’s extensions were broken and most of the team now had day jobs and obligations. This time there wouldn’t be two dorks writing code, forgoing sleep, and frantically recruiting a team to pull New XKit into working order. Instead, we were gifted something better, something that was designed from the ground up to be a good time for everyone involved. We got XKit Rewritten, the unparalleled effort from @april, the new talent from last paragraph who had only been improving since I last mentioned her. This new addon had all the most important features of New XKit with none of the accumulated cruft. New XKit could finally rest.
Today, ten years on from the first build of New XKit, I’d like to thank everyone who made this journey a possibility. First, I want to single out the people who made up the original core New XKit team: 0xazure, @blackjackkent, @xumbra, ChuckL, @consensual-blathering, finagle, @nightpool, @april, @invalidcards, and Wolvan. You all rocked this! Thank you for helping guide this ponderous project in a good direction. I hope you found it as educational and inspiring as I did! Second, thank you to all of the other contributors! In the interest of brevity, I’ll defer to GitHub’s full list but I’d especially like to thank @transienturl for their recent herculean efforts to make sure New XKit can receive critical updates in the future. We couldn’t have done it without all the people who volunteered their time, thank you for choosing us to help! Finally, I’d like to thank everyone who used New XKit. Your passion for the project is what kept it going. I hope that all the bugs you encountered were at least somewhat comedic. And of course, thank you, dear reader, for making it this far!
