Davidville

Entries categorized as ‘Q & A’

Weekend update

November 4, 2007 · 120 Comments

So sorry for the interruptions over the last few days! A bug surfaced in a new caching library we were using (APC) that was wreaking havoc across our servers. It wound up being extremely tedious to locate.

A HUGE thanks to Marco (and his fiance, Tiffany) for pulling some absurd hours over the weekend to get things sorted out. It was absolutely devastating watching the new Tumblr have trouble its first few days.

Another giant thank you to all of our friends who jumped up to help the moment they noticed something was awry. Marc Goldberg at Next New Networks, Benjamin Stein at Mobile Commons, Anthony Volodkin at Hype Machine, everyone at Vimeo, and anyone I’m forgetting — you’re our heroes. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

We’ve also gotten through most of the bug reports you’ve sent in. Please keep them coming if you see anything acting funny. Some updates and notes on your feedback:

  • Fixed: The Rich Text Editor was breaking certain post fields in Windows IE.
  • Fixed: The Rich Text Editor has been acting funny in Safari 3. We’ve tried to accommodate for most of its quirks. The guys at Moxiecode that make the editor have a new version coming out with much better Safari support — It’s just not quite stable enough for us to use yet. If it’s causing any trouble, consider turning off Rich Text on your Settings screen.
  • Fixed: A bug that was incorrectly adding Feeds as “link w/ descriptions”. Please delete and recreate any affected Feeds.
  • Fixed: The Theme editor was returning errors for some users.
  • The “Hide my friend’s posts” link on the Dashboard was replaced in favor of the new “Edit” button on your tumblelog’s permalink (post) pages. The “Show/hide my friends” button was always a major cause of confusion and support emails.
  • We’re working on a version of the Theme editor that lets you expand the HTML editing area.
  • When editing a post, we were using the post’s original editing method to determine whether we would show rich text, plain text, or markdown. This was confusing people, so we now override the editor with your current setting (except when the post was created using Markdown).
  • Radar is offline for quality control reasons while we build the new Tumblr.com home page to replace it.
  • Please hit Refresh on any form with the Rich Text Editor if it’s not behaving.

It’s taking us some time to get through all the support emails from last week. Sorry if you haven’t heard back yet. support@tumblr.com is still the best way to reach us. Thanks for being patient.

Lastly, given just how large the Tumblr community has become (and how much interesting feedback we’re getting in our Inbox), we’d like to hurry up and get a Tumblr Forum online next week. Any thoughts or preferences on forum software?

Thanks everyone!

Categories: Changes · Q & A · Tumblr

We hear you!

March 6, 2007 · 22 Comments

Every week we’re going to set aside a post to answer your questions and feedback. If there’s anything you’d like to throw into the fray, just leave a comment. Thank you!

Sometimes I upload 20 shots of products or a particular photo shoot [to Flickr], but I don’t necessarily want all 20 of those to appear full-sized in Tumblr.

Lots of Tumblr users have been using Flickr’s built-in tags to mark photos for import. Just tag your desired Flickr photos with something like “tumblr”, and subscribe to that tag’s RSS feed.

I was wondering if Google Adsense ads are allowed to be added to Tumblr?

We haven’t formed an official policy on advertising. But since our philosophy is building Tumblr into a complete tool, we certainly don’t want to alienate any of our pro-users. Ads are a-okay. We’ll update you if our Terms of Service changes.

Could you show more featured tumblelogs? I’d like to see what others are doing.

We’re working on some VERY cool ways to explore tumblelogs. Check back soon!

I’d like to communicate somehow. Maybe blogs with comments and trackbacks are just different than tumbelogs, but I want 2-way communication. Any recommendations?

We absolutely understand the value of a web site being an interactive experience. That said, we, and many of our users, don’t believe “comments”, as they are currently being applied on blogs, will enhance the tumblelog experience. That’s not a cop-out though. We’re staging several experimental interfaces for user feedback. Lots of neat things to come. We promise!

I’m having trouble getting posts from before the date I added the feed to import…

When you add a feed to be imported, we grab the latest post, and then every one posted after that.

The only thing missing from Tumblr is tags and a tag cloud to make navigating older posts easier.

Tags are in development as an OPTIONAL feature that can be tucked away and disabled if you don’t care for the clutter. Look out for this soon.

I know you want to keep Tumblr as simple as possible, but I would love to see a feature for scheduled posting.

We’ll be adding the ability to set the date and time of posts, as well as forward date them for scheduled publishing.

[It would be great] if it could have a “VIDEO” type in the feed imports. I have an RSS feed of my favorite youtube videos and I would LOVE it if it worked the same way as directly posting a video (seeing the video preview and play button instead of just a link).

Totally agree. We’ll make this happen.

Categories: Q & A · Tumblr