#tumblripper

AsTumblr is taking down adult content I searched online to find a way to download my vids. I found Tumblripper and it’s great and easy to install and use. 

Get it here:

http://www.zark.be/software/TumblRipper.html

(then click download setup, may be a bit hard to see)

I was surprised to see that it downloaded all my liked content, did not expect that and ofc it downloaded all the content on my blog as well.

I found the above link from this link:

https://www.cnet.com/how-to/download-all-images-from-one-tumblr-site/

When i first wrote Tumblripper, it was for my own usage. At the time i didn't have 4G on my smartphone, and i looked at different tumblr's for photographic inspiration. So i quickly made a small ripper. Couple of months later, I decided to polish it up a bit and release it. I think i just posted it on CNET and one or two other sites. To my surprise it started popping up a lot in google searches, with couple of blog posts about it, and guides on how to use it. If i recall correctly, there has always been a DONATE button on the site (because i already had it made for chrome/firefox extension), but it never got any action. Bug reports and feature requests started rolling it, so i thought i might as well ask people to donate to motivate me on updating this piece of software, so i made an updated version, which could only  be downloaded if you had donated (you'd get a special link). Let's be honest here, the old version worked fine, the new one was maybe 20% faster and had a couple of options more, that's it, let's call it an "Advanced" version. Donations started coming in. Most were at the minimum amount (classy), and some people even managed bypassing the minimum and sending even less (very classy, those had their licence cancelled though). Over the following month's i increased the minimum from 1euro to 2euro to now 5euro. Simply because the PayPal fee's are almost the samen and the software has become much more complex.

Anyways, that's just a brief history, but what i wanted to talk about, is the principle of Donationware. Personnally, i like it . Usually it's for completely free software, and you give a little something if you feel like you should contribute. (I do for a lot of free software i use). In Tumblripper however, i decided to lock part of the software for supporters. I wish i didn't have to, but otherwise i'd get nothing back. Most donations coming in have the minimum amount, but sometimes, sometimes, i get a different amount, and that makes me smile. Let me explain, On my site, to donate, you have to select the amount between 5 and 20€. For every amount in between those values, i have set a little text which basically explains to what you are contributing in my life . What it says when you select a different amount, even just a euro more, it's like sending a hug, saying you care , and it makes me smile for the rest of the day.

Working on the new release as we speak. It’s indexing a massive Tumblr blog, so taking the time to write a little post on the new indexing engine i designed.

Basically, indexing a Tumblr blog takes a while, because you need to crawl through the archive and identify every post.

Here’s how it currently works : 

load /archive page on the tumblr blog

scan tags for posts and add to a list

find the ‘next’ button and the time-stamp it contains

rinse and repeat until nothing is left.

This is basically the equivalent of pulling a thread from a yarn ball. So we can only scan one page at a time. This method has been used in TR since the beginning, and been highly optimised to make it as fast as possible. (Even in V2 having the downloading occur during the scanning, which results in too many I/O errors due to network resource starvation). So for v3, i decided to get back to indexing first, downloading after. But that means waiting sometimes a long time before any downloading gets done ... But .... I had a brilliant idea to speed up the indexing ! Here’s how it now works :

load /archive page on the tumblr blog

scan the calendar widget to determine date of first post

Delta the latest post and earliest post and divide by X

Launch X crawlers at different dates and have the crawler stop when it find a duplicate.

Working until 1 am again.

I need to get this thing out. It seems like every time i open it, it’s almost ready for beta release, and then i fix this and that, and make a better window for the update, and then a cleaner settings window, and ...

But last night’s session was important. I decided to ditch my “update system” (big word for a simple API call and compare the version number), and use Squirrel .   It’s basically something quite similar to Microsoft’s ClickOnce (which in theory was great, but then when you actually use it ... *sigh*). It’s not too bad to set-up, i managed integrating it in my build process so it’s pretty much automated. 

So far it seems pretty cool. I’m just a little disappointed with a couple of points,

Would have been nice to have a web-installer

The loading animation during setup should show always. (It only shows if setup is taking “too long”)

Clearly missing a updater.IsUpdateAvailable() method. I don’t want the software to invisibly update, but i feel like the user HAS to agree to update (preferably with a change log window), like FileZilla does.

On their site, they claim they support “Channels” a-la-chrome (dev/stable/..)  . But this is not the case ! Not out of the box. They probably means that it’s a pattern that is possible with Squirrel. But then they should do a quick guide on how to achieve this.  I would very much like my users to simply be able to select the channel in the “Advanced Settings” tab, and participate in the beta program that way.

They implemented a nice setting that allows you to specify the percentage of rollouts for a Release. But they don’t explain how this is achieved. (Is it a dice roll every time you look for an update ? )

So that’s for the new Update system. It should make updating smoother, and allow for more frequent updates.

I’ve also decided to implement a “Anonymous Usage” box, that will be always ticked for beta testers and free users, and optional for supporters. 

Still working on TR v3.

Things are starting to look good. It’s been so many times i rewrote this thing, but this time i think i took the right road (by basically not trying to cut corners)

I always wanted TumblRipper to be multi-platform and to have a CLI interface. But making multi-platform apps, it’s not that easy. In theory it is, and making some Proof Of Concepts run on multiple OS is trivial. The Mono project is very usable, and gtk# pretty complete too.

But making a GOOD application work in different environments is another question. You need to start making conditions and test for the different platforms, do this, do that.... And because the main user base, is Windows, it’s a shame to not be able to use WPF (which i personally love), and limit to gtk# 

Long story short, i rewrote TRv3 and started by using a correct project structure. Creating different projects for different concerns. Also i wanted a plugin interface, so that made a couple of new projects too.

So now, i have 

Core Project

Plugin Interface ( so that others can build plugins)

Tumblr Plugin (and others to come)

WPF GUI Project

  In case of cataclysmic failure of the potential buyout of Tumblr by Yahoo, I am saving all my pics and such to my hard drive. If you want to do the same I have found an easy to use program called TumblRipper. While there are a few other tumblr pic downloading programs around, I found this one the simplest to use. You can basically download the pics off yours (or anyones) blog to a designated folder of your choice. I suggest if you want to do this, then do so within the next 12 hours. Note that depending on how much you post it may take a little while to download all your images.

While I do not think anything specifically negative will come about if Yahoo does buy Tumblr, we in the multimedia industry go by the golden rule "Always, ALWAYS back up your information". So if you just want to do this out of fun and to have a stable backup of the images you posted, its not a bad idea just in case.

Also this wont download any associated text, notes, videos, or anything else (though it will get .gifs). If you know of something that downloads text off of tumblr let me know and Ill amend this entry, otherwise I suggest you open notepad and start copy/pasting.

Note: I am not tech support for this program, its pretty straightforward to use...if you have any problems, contact the program creator at their site...PC only. There is a donation version (version 0.81) but the normal version 0.6 is sufficient.