ok whats the funniest lie you have about how tumblr works
[ID: A reply by @/demonbunny5 which reads: “you can find posts by searching for them with the search bar.” End ID]
Tags:
#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #Tumblr: a User’s Guide #(sort of) #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
Currently, the tumblr API just… lets you make a post in which you “reply” to an “ask” from an arbitrary user, containing arbitrary content.
In tumblr’s Neue Post Format (NPF), responses to asks look similar to other posts. The only difference is that they have a special entry in their “layout,” specifying which part of the post is the ask, and who it is from.
Right now, if you try to create an NPF post with this kind of layout entry in it, it just works! You can use this to make an “ask” from anyone, containing anything, and answer it.
This is a huge bug and presumably will get fixed sometime soon?
HowI discovered the bug:
Weirdly enough, I find out about it while trying to improve @nostalgebraist-autoresponder’s alt text features this past week.
As you may have noticed, Frank now writes alt text differently, with more clarity about which pieces are AI-generated and what role they play.
While making this change, I found myself newly frustrated with my inability to use line breaks in alt text. The API used to let me do it, but then it stopped, hence all the “[newline]” stuff in older alt texts.
After poking around, I found that you can use line breaks in alt text on tumblr, and you can do this through the API, but only if you create posts in NPF.
Frank creates posts in legacy, not NPF. This has been true forever, and it works fine so I’ve had no reason to change it.
Fully rewriting Frank’s post creation code to use NPF would take a lot of work.
Right now, Frank’s language model generates text very close to a limited subset of HTML, which I can send to tumblr as “legacy” post content basically as-is. To create posts in NPF, I’d have to figure out the right way to convert that limited HTML into NPF’s domain-specific block language.
I wasn’t going to do that just to support this one nicety of alt text formatting.
“But wait…”, I thought.
“Frank is already making these posts, with the alt text, in legacy format. And once they exist on tumblr, it’s easy to determine how to represent them in NPF. I just fetch the existing post, in NPF format.”
So all I need to do is
Have Frank make the post, as a draft, with the alt text containing “[newline]” or something in place of the line breaks I really want.
Fetch this draft, in NPF.
Create a new NPF post, with the same contents that we just fetched, in whichever state we wanted for the original post (draft, published, or queued).
Delete the draft we made in step 1.
This was convoluted, but it worked! I patted myself on the back for a clever workaround, and went on to do other stuff for a while…
…and then it hit me.
In the case where the post was a response to an ask, Frank was doing the following:
Responding to the ask.
Fetching the response in NPF.
Creating a completely new post, identical to the response – including the contents of the original ask.
Deleting the original ask.
Meaning, you can just make asks ab nihilo, apparently.
So after a few more tests, I went and made the @staff ask, as one does.
Unfortunately, once the bug gets fixed, Frank’s newlines-in-alt-text solution won’t work for asks anymore… oh well, it wasn’t a big deal anyway.
Tags:
#The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #Tumblr: a User’s Guide #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what
#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #Tumblr: a User’s Guide #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
Love to be on a website where I can join such hit 2022 fandoms as “century old public domain novel being read very slowly” and “half-century old mafia film that does not actually exist.”
Tags:
#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #Tumblr: a User’s Guide
#I know I am very late here #my consider-reblogging list piled up a bunch while I was sick and whatnot #(and for that matter I didn’t even *originally* see this post until it was too late to vote) #but what a beautiful piece of history #I especially love the illustrations #The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #surveys #bugs #I wonder how polls will show up in tumblr-utils scrapes #(…oh my god‚ in the new post UI you can edit tags)
{{Polls show up in tumblr-utils scrapes like this:
This is similar to what you’d see visiting the webpage. Almost all of the information is missing, available only through the dashboard view. As such, I will be using cropped dashboard screenshots to display polls here.}}
Ive reblogged so many posts about Glass Onion that tumblr thinks I’m really into onions. It’s recommended me an oil painting of onions and gifs from a documentary about garlic. Thickest algorithm in the world please never make it smarter
Tracking Service, as helpfully as possible: Your order is out for delivery! It should arrive by 8 PM today!
Me, sitting by the door at 8:12 AM: pakige
Me opening my apartment door anytime I hear the outside door open despite it being 10AM: Böx?
envelööp?
Tags:
#I found out today that I’ve never actually reblogged the pakige post #thank you OP for keeping the post around and making it easier to track down a copy #also if you are reading this I think you should know that I once called this post ”a fucking gift to society” and I stand by that #language #that one post with the thing #Tumblr: a User’s Guide
The bots are really funny to me because I only really started using Tumblr at the start of this year and y’all are so chill about it. It’s like a weather event, like I’m experiencing snow for the first time and everyone else is just “oh, it’s been a while since that happened”
Seeing more and more blogs without a [username].tumblr.com site which means you can only view their blogs in tumblr.com/[username] mode, and I realized just the other day that nowadays you have to manually go to your blog settings and toggle the “enable custom theme” switch to have a browser site activated.
I REALLY recommend activating this! Especially if you’re an artist or if you have a themed blog, like if you reblog fanart for a specific fandom or ship. First and foremostly you can change the whole theme if you want to, you can really just go wild with building your personal aesthetic for your page.
But what I think is even more important, is that you NEED to “enable custom theme” to enable access to your archive! The link [username].tumblr.com/archive doesn’t work if you don’t have this enabled!
If you post art or archive fanart or fandom content of any kind, letting people access your archive makes it so much easier for people (and yourself) to find older art on your blog or to look for something you drew a while ago that they remember loving and want to look at again.
We talk lots about how on Tumblr old art gets to circulate, and the archive is part of how that works. It’s a really useful tool in finding good content that isn’t brand new. And especially if you are good at tagging, it’s very easy to filter the archive to find ship content or meta or fics, whatever you want to find.
Checked on this and you have to activate it on web view – the option isn’t there in the mobile app. I didn’t have it activated, so even if you’ve been here since well before Dashcon, might want to check on that.
It looks like they’ve fixed the inability to view “/archive”, but I recommend having a browser site anyway.
Tags:
#fight the slippery slope towards Internet silos #PSA #reply via reblog #Tumblr: a User’s Guide #The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #disappointed permanent resident of The Future
Tumblr now has “community labels”. When I see a description of them that only describes how they behave on the dash, not on the username.tumblr.com view, it allegedly makes me want to engage in cartoonish and unrealistic violence, such as hitting staff with a giant mallet, which I will for this purpose choose to tag with the “violence” label!
Brinens and Things 