Tumblr: a User’s Guide

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

theunitofcaring:

ozymandias271:

petition for theunitofcaring to get a real blog

Right now this would be a very bad idea! Hits on a blog are, as it happens, a quantifiable thing that changes every minute and tends to go up when I work harder. When presented with things like this, my brain adopts them as the totality of its self-esteem and stops working on all goals that are harder to measure/optimize. 

(last time I tried this I failed all my classes. I really suck at incentives.)

However! I have attained a software internship this summer and I should have more free time and capacity-to-motivate-myself-to-do-my-homework is less relevant and it would be really cool to have a real blog. So maybe I’ll do it then.

Perhaps there’s a way of preventing yourself from being able to see the analytics? Like that add-on that hides your Tumblr follower count. (I don’t know what add-on that is, but one of my friends has mentioned using it, so I know it exists.)

I don’t know you well enough to even hazard a guess at how difficult undoing the blocking would need to be for it to be effective, but it’s something to consider if and when you start looking into getting a long-form blog.

*signs petition, on condition of finding a way around self-esteem traps*

Tags:

#reply via reblog

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

comparativelysuperlative:

I’ve been wondering lately about the topology of Tumblr.

It’s best known for having a science side, but also has a lot more. Nobody (to my knowledge) has a master list of what sides there are, but Tumblr does contain (in approximate order of “what was the top result when I asked Google to exclude the others”) weird, dark, fandom, social justice, math, funny, technical, techinical, geek, clean, skeleton war, and weather sides. And many more.

These sides tend to intersect a lot, and they are not remotely the same size. Unless you think there are equal numbers of posts mentioning (to pick two) weather and cats.

The shape we’re looking at has few or no faces that share a vertex without also sharing an edge. (Tetrahedron and dodecahedron pass this, cube and octahedron fail.) This is because any two sides of Tumblr that share one point almost certainly share two. There are going to be very few pairs of subjects that have precisely one post about both of them.

The question I really want an answer to is, assuming we knew the number of sides and everything, how many spatial dimensions it would take to build a Tumblr.
But whenever I thought I had made progress on that my brain collapsed under the weight of shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity by whose obscuration the Mathematicians have already been prompted into making a covenant with the Devil to darken the spirit and confine man in the bonds of Hell. That, and I got lazy.

Instead, I’ll settle for changing the shape of Tumblr and rendering any existing model obsolete. To do that, I’ll publish a post that represents an intersection between sides of Tumblr in a combination that has never occurred before. This will add an extra vertex to our city of crazily elusive angles where the relative position of everything is phantasmally variable.

That post is of course this one. It’s primarily part of the Tumblr side of Tumblr, but also the geometry and math sides, the…cold inhuman urban geometry side? That exists? Well this post is on it, along with most of the posts that mention R’lyeh I guess. And I can stretch to claim that this is part of the Christian side of Tumblr for its St. Augustine quotation. That this post is also an intersection with the geek side goes without saying. Probably more. I’ll make it part of the English side by pointing out that all uses of the Oxford comma are deliberate.

Finally, to make extremely certain that no earlier post has intersected the same set of sides as this one, I’ll add the cat, political, and “gunblr” sides to the list by saying that there should have been a stricter background check for the following gun owner:

image

Tags:

#Tumblr: a User’s Guide #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog

Image ~ ~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

steveandbucky:

 

framdoms:

Boys

Tags:

#Tumblr: a User’s Guide #seems legit #(I don’t recognise the name Natalie Dormer) #(but I expect if you explained to me who she is I would recognise the explanation) #(*asks Wikipedia*) #(okay maybe not) #(I mean she was in Mockingjay but that’s about it)

PSA: if you don’t want people finding you through your email on tumblr:

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

tenderagender:

tenderagender:

go here and it’s the first option

it’s always been an option that i’ve always had turned off, i think the new update just made it easier to find someone if that option isn’t disabled

for people who can’t click through, here’s a manual link:

https://www.tumblr.com/settings/account

i’m serious. don’t ignore this. there are people who are worried their abusers can find them now, and this can give them more protection.

Tags:

#PSA #the more you know #Tumblr: a User’s Guide #hmm #this is on the verge of being too guilt-trippy for me #I suppose I’ll let it slide this time as they do make a good point #I personally found this option a while back and deliberately left it turned on #because Brin has her own email address separate from legalname!me #and I’m totally happy for anyone who knows Brin’s email to know about Brin’s Tumblr #but those of you who don’t have that setup might find this useful

Image ~ ~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

whatshouldwecallfibro:

prettysickart:

cougarmeat:

panther-caroso:

so for some ungodly reason tumblr staff decided it’d be a good idea to allow flashy gifs or incredibly bright images to be a background for the login screen. a lot of people i know are photosensitive and prone to headaches or other, worse things that can be caused by this. so naturally i wrote a small script to disable those completely. hopefully permanently.

you can find it here. you’ll need the browser extension/addon stylish for it to work, which you should be able to get from the website itself if i remember correctly. hope it helps someone o7

This is seriously so important. I suffer epilepsy and am extremly photosensitive, as I am sure a lot of other epileptics are. Please, spread this around, you could seriously save someone.

For our epileptic followers

Hi everyone! I know this isn’t a funny gif post, but I’m extremely photosensitive and know that many others with fibro are as well. 

 
 
 
 
 

Tags:

#PSA #Tumblr: a User’s Guide

Remember when you first discovered Tumblr and you would scroll down your dashboard until you reached the spot where you left the day before?

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

{{OP by kittiezandtittiez}}

 

comparativelysuperlative:

Yeah, I remember doing that, back before I found out about…uh, what exactly is it that we competent people do instead? I’m asking for a friend.

There are multiple aspects to this post, I think.

“The day before” implies only checking Tumblr once a day.

“Scroll down” implies reading in reverse-chronological order, though that might not actually be considered strange or noobish. (I personally find the spot where I left off last time, then work my way up, making heavy use of the “k” shortcut.)

The primary implication, however, is that an experienced Tumblr user eventually ends up following so many people that they cannot keep up with their dash, and resort to only reading some of it. (I personally try very hard to avoid this, and have been known to unfollow or not-follow-in-the-first-place people because of them posting too much.)

Tags:

#reply via reblog #Tumblr: a User’s Guide #I hope this works #my keyboard is acting weird #keeps typing random letters or spaces instead of what I pressed #this post brought to you by vast quantities of backspacing

Missing Asks!

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{previous post in sequence}}

blue-author:

thorhugs:

hammerandrage:

I FOUND IT! I FOUND THE ANSWER!

Okay, maybe not the final answer, but part of the problem! Asks keep getting eaten. Which is a big problem when you’re doing something anon and don’t want to ask the person “did you get it”? 

If the ask contains an ellipsis without a trailing space, it gets eaten. It says delivered, but it goes nowhere.

So “Well… then” will get delivered but “Well…then” won’t!

Hopefully this helps in getting your asks actually delivered.

Post I made for my RP account, but very relevant elsewhere.

After discovering this, I tested it. Five different accounts between two people, anon vs not. No matter what, without fail, if the trailing space was missing, the message was not delivered.

I contacted Tumblr staff. They were already fully aware this was happening, but it is not documented anywhere. Nor do they seem keen on giving their users a warning about it in any fashion.

Help me spread the word because the staff won’t!

The reason this happens is the same as the reason they won’t fix it: this is how they prevent people from sending links in asks. Instead of using any of a number of easily implemented regular expressions for parsing/recognizing URLs, they just declare that any time there are words on either side of any number of dots with no space, that’s a link. So if you forget to space between sentences or you wind up one character short and decide to trim some spaces, you can also fall afoul of the filter.

It’s a very lazy, slapdash solution and the fact that they choose to make the asks silently fail to deliver instead of telling you a link was detected or whatever makes it even worse.

Tags:

#Tumblr: a User’s Guide #oh look an update #I guess that explanation makes sense #in an awful sort of way