I spend so much time viewing Tumblr through the Dashboard, I forgot how pretty my blog is to the outside world. Thanks Carlo Franco!
![(via Tumblr Numbers: The Rapid Rise of Social Blogging [INFOGRAPHIC])
Tumblr is really, really white. This isn’t the first time I’ve seen the gender split lean towards men before either. It strikes me as odd because my experience suggests otherwise.](http://www.tumblr.com/photo/1280/madthoughts/12804228668/1/tumblr_luo7o9zUPy1qz4zha)
(via Tumblr Numbers: The Rapid Rise of Social Blogging [INFOGRAPHIC])
Tumblr is really, really white. This isn’t the first time I’ve seen the gender split lean towards men before either. It strikes me as odd because my experience suggests otherwise.
Source: Mashable
Twenty
A short film by William Wilkinson. (previously)
Funny. Although cite your sources, son. This is an Eastbound and Down parody.
Source: willw
No big deal just hanging out in THE PRESIDENT’S HOUSE
Karp is in DC. All you missing-e fans— here’s your chance.
Source: david
As a public service announcement, and because I’m trying to teach myself how to build a tumblr app, I want to remind folks that each of your Tumblr blogs has an email you can send stuff to, which will then appear on your blog.
You can find the email on the Goodies page.
And you can find out how it all works here.
Google Plus
Really want to start fooling around with this.
Awww, Tumblr, don’t look at me like that. You know I love you the most.
Hands-On: Twitter's New Photo-Sharing Service
I wonder if Tumblr is worried about this at all? When Tumblr launched, many people spotlighted that it was “micro-blogging” mixed with media.
Tumblr Dashboard Update Part II
Now that I think about it, they are really pushing the tag and Explore stuff pretty hard, so they must think that’s the key to eventually making some money off this thing.
What’s that? Link to my post from last year titled 7 ways to make Tumblr better (from a Tumblr addict). Sure, if you’d like to read it again.
Tumblr Dashboard Update
It’s fine. I don’t have any major problems with it outside the hadnful of seconds it took to find some things.
Is it me, or does Tumblr only seem to fix the things that A) aren’t broken and B) no one is really asking for. The newest updates to Explore comes immediately to mind.
I really need a Tumblr Dashboard view that can filter out the people I like, but toss up NSFW stuff.
Keeping myself entertained.
Infrastructure Update
Hi, everyone. I wanted to run through a few of the things our engineers have been working on behind the scenes.
Our #1 priority has been bringing your blogs back to 100% uptime. We project the graph below on our wall, showing us exactly how many error messages we are serving instead of real pages.
We live and die by this chart, and we’ve been pulling nights and weekends working to remove the bottlenecks that have made “over capacity” errors routine. The list of systems we’ve tackled includes everything from networking equipment to database queries to the deep dark insides of the Linux kernel. (If working on these kinds of challenge gets your pulse up, we want to hear from you.)
As we break through our past bottlenecks, we are simultaneously faced with growth like we’ve never seen before. Our challenge is not only to support the current audience of 55 million, but to get ahead of more than 250,000,000 new pageviews each week.
Still, we’ve made incredible progress in improving our infrastructure. We’re not out of the woods yet, but we expect these coming weeks to be much smoother than the past few rocky months. We’re incredibly confident in our ability to scale to serve all of the visitors to your awesome blogs.
A couple specific issues I want to cover:
• The Queue feature has been disabled more often than not over the last two weeks. We hit an incredibly difficult problem with the way the Queue processes handle their publishing step that forced us to unwind and rewrite a big chunk of our publishing routine. The Queues have been completely restored for the last couple days and we don’t foresee any more issues.
• This morning we suffered an outage for nearly an hour starting at about 7am EST. The proxy server that handles the vast majority of incoming requests failed, and its automatic backup also failed because of an unrelated networking issue. It took us longer than hoped to correct the multiple causes, but we’ve put systems into place to make sure that even another double failure won’t cause an outage like this in the future.
If you ever run into issues, please don’t hesitate to contact support. And you can check known issues via our Twitter feed or Help page.
Thank you for your patience and support through all of this. To make up for it, we have some absolutely epic product updates around the corner.
All good news. I’m looking forward to the product updates as well. Let’s hope those can scale as well.
Source: staff
Mad Thoughts: 7 ways to make Tumblr better (from a Tumblr addict)
I’ve been working on this list in my head for a while and since I’m so bored tonight, I figured I’d go ahead and write it up. Have I thought it all the way through? No, but when has thinking been germane to the Tumblr experience?
The problem that I see is that Tumblr has had such a hard time just staying afloat, they are missing opportunities to really improve this experience in functional ways. And I find myself spending less time on here because my dash has been taken over by ask box kudzu and by reblogs of the same 10 super-popular tumblrs. Not only has the Tumblr backend failed in the face of growth, but so has the front-end experience.
It’s to the point where I really wish Tumblr would take seriously the need to help us addicts make a bit more sense of all the noise, to put the tumblrs we follow into lists, to be able to filter out reblogs from our feed, to allow a better commenting system so that ask boxes are used more rarely and more interestingly, to allow hashtags or rooms or whatever to group memes (a la twitter), to have an actual search function that isn’t worse than “random post,” and so on.
I think the answer lies somewhere in the API. Why does Twitter have so many clients, but Tumblr have so few? Can you imagine Tumbldeck, with all kinds of feeds: lists/group feeds, search feeds, post type feeds (listening to a feed of audio posts as a mixtape!). I mean, oh my god, I would so be there.
Emphasis by me, not Wadcity.
Source: madthoughts
7 ways to make Tumblr better (from a Tumblr addict)
I’ve been working on this list in my head for a while and since I’m so bored tonight, I figured I’d go ahead and write it up. Have I thought it all the way through? No, but when has thinking been germane to the Tumblr experience?
Stats. Metrics. Analytics. Not the Google Analytics kind. I don’t need to know pageviews or visit counts. Google Analytics is easy to install and it does it way better than Tumblr could. But I would like to have easy access to see what my most popular posts are. At the end of last year, I tried to use Google Analytics to determine my top posts of 2010, but that’s going by pageviews or visits, which doesn’t equal Notes, and Google can’t tell me what was from 2010, 2009, or 2008.
Let me know how my follower count is increasing over time, what my most popular posts are (my own posts and posts I reblogged in separate categories), and how often and on what days I end up in the Directory.
Following Lists. Let me break the blogs I follow down by lists. Twitter did this well, by allowing you to add someone to a list without actually following it, and I think Tumblr should do the same. I love the dashboard, but as Tumblr grows, so does the diversity of blogs I follow. I’d still use the dashboard the most, with everything in my lists on shuffle, but when I only want to see comic book stuff, let me just look at my list. I stopped following a lot of music blogs because I wasn’t always in the mood for listening to new jams. If I had the list, I could open that up when I was in the mood.
Comments. I know this is a point of contention for the folks at Tumblr, but I think it’s time to build this in natively. I get why they aren’t there. I think it’s a sound idea to eliminate comments. If you have something to say about a post, you have to post it to your own blog to say it. It’s supposed to eliminate all the crap that internet comments can produce.
But it hasn’t gone away has it? With the Ask box, and “Reblog this if…” posts, we are still seeing the drudge that a comment system can produce, only now it’s in a full fledged post. Let’s build in comments (hell, it doesn’t even have to be external of the dashboard) and give people the option to turn their comment into a post.
A new post type. I like the seven we have, but how about a List post? Or an Instructions post? Or even a Live Blog post? Let’s toss something new in the mix and give all the theme designers a headache for a few weeks.
This is the most disposable of all my suggestions.
Instant Messaging. I see people talking to each other all the time through posts. Let’s let them chat to each other with a button that will instant publish the conversation as a Chat post. Is that too social network-y for a blogging platform? Maybe, but I see people posting their Google or AOL chat names on their blogs all the time. People seem to want to talk to the people that follow them. THE ASK BOX! Let them do it in way that isn’t so invasive to the rest of the community.
Fix the Theme Garden. It’s not really broken, but it is slow. Make it faster and give me more options to search for theme types.
Cut out the downtime. Duh.
