Tumblr: a User’s Guide

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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postmodernmulticoloredcloak:

brin-bellway:

welcome–to–awkwardville:

brin-bellway:

welcome–to–awkwardville:

the troubles of a person with prosopagnosia and anxiety:

*sees post with pictures of very popular actor they look at pictures of all day*

*tags it with name of very popular actor*

*almost clicks the reblog button*

*checks pictures five times to make sure the pictures actually portray very famous actor and not someone who looks a bit like him*

*feels ashamed because they literally look at pictures of very famous actor all day so it’s very embarrassing not to be sure if it’s really him*

Would you like advice or do you just want to vent? I don’t want to go barging in here with tips if that wouldn’t be appropriate.

it’s okay! i wouldn’t mind advice :)

I’ve found the TagViewer extension for XKit to be very helpful for this situation. To give a relatively recent example (that I’m not sure whether I ever actually reblogged, but it’s still a good example of the process):

1. See gifset of person who may or may not be Taylor Swift playing with small fluffy animals.

2. Press TagViewer button on post.

3. Scroll through the list of reblogs with tags and what tags they used. See that the majority of reblogs with any tags at all contain the tag “taylor swift”, “tswift”, “tay-tay”, or other variations thereupon. See that nobody has tagged it with a name other than Taylor Swift.

4. Feel much more confident that the picture is of Taylor Swift now that you’ve gotten dozens of concurring opinions.

right! thanks :D

Tags:

#(April 2015) #(welcome–to–awkwardville and postmodernmulticoloredcloak are the same person) #conversational aglets #Tumblr: a User’s Guide #prosopagnosia #(the agletting project has made it very striking just how much I used to blog about prosopagnosia) #(I’m not sure why the frequency dropped)

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~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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Since Tumblr, in its hellsiteishness, does not include timestamps on the individual parts of a reblog chain, I feel that I cannot in good conscience reblog a probably-completely-outdated discussion of Tumblr’s limitations. (Sure, I’ll say at the *end* that it’s from April 2015, but you don’t know it’s old until *after* you’ve read it.)

Instead: https://web.archive.org/web/20190116180909/http://tinierpurplefishes.tumblr.com/post/115744971982/brin-bellway-tinierpurplefishes-brin-bellway

Tags:

#conversational aglets #Tumblr: a User’s Guide #The Great Tumblr Apocalypse

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i exist in a state of constant stress. and also new york

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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{{OP by buckykingofmemes}}

sigmaleph:

brin-bellway:

sigmaleph:

#(i know there’s a word for this specific type of wordplay but i’m not sure what it is)

#(i think it might have begun with a z)

Zeugma!

Thank you!

P.S. Do my tags display to you as being in all-lowercase? Will you miss out if I use Very Important Letters in tag-rambling?

Tags display in lowercase in mobile, so if I’m not on desktop then yes

*places this next to “italics fail to display under some circumstances (definitely certain blog styles, maybe others)” on list of writing-style aspects that need to be avoided when working around the hellsite*

Tags:

#I think this is the first time I’ve referred to it as ”the hellsite” #there was a time that I specifically avoided calling it that because I didn’t think it was bad enough to deserve that moniker #but post-apocalyptic Tumblr deserves it #reply via reblog #Tumblr: a User’s Guide

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

Remember, there’s more to backing up a Tumblr than the posts! Make sure to grab copies of your: 

  • Drafts (WordPress will include these in their Tumblr export, or you can post them and then use any method that backs up posts, or copy them manually into some notepad program)
  • Queue (I don’t *think* WordPress includes these, but there’s still posting them or manual copying; I pretty much never use my queue, so I don’t have any experienced techniques for archiving it)
  • Inbox (I paste mine into a Word document: the formatting is a bit off, but it’s still fairly readable, and you can always clean it up)
  • Outbox (same method as inbox)
  • PM logs (I separate these into one Word document per person)
  • List of followed blogs, to help you consider which other blogs to archive† or to find elsewhere (there might be a cleverer way to do this, but I simply went through my list and wrote everything down in another Word document; I also included a note of how many there were in total, so I can tell at a glance if any vanish from Tumblr)

—

†You don’t need to own a blog to use the tumblr-utils backup method [link] on it.

Tags:

#The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #The Last Tumblr Apocalypse #Tumblr: a User’s Guide #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #oh look an original post #(technically I use LibreOffice and not Word but I didn’t want to distract from the point) #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #Wordpress

~ Brin ~ 4 Comments

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About that post a couple hours ago that read “This is a test of the emergency systems. It will be deleted shortly.”:

I was checking whether deleting a post from Tumblr and then re-syncing my backups erases the backed-up post. Preliminary testing suggests that, for both local and WordPress copies, it does not.

While there are certainly flaws to that approach, I think it beats the alternatives. Especially given the…recent events on Tumblr.

—

Relatedly, I’ve done a bit of looking around into alternative platforms, in case the worst occurs. I’ve particularly focused on platforms inter-operable with Mastodon (Mastodon is, after all, a Fediverse platform), hoping to be able to interact with Mastodon dwellers without being subject to the ridiculously small character limit.

It seems like all of the platforms listed as compatible want to be either Twitter or Facebook, with nothing that quite sates my love of reblog chains [link]. Pleroma [link] seems like it might do, I suppose, although it’s still awfully Twitter-y.

Tags:

#oh look an original post #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #Tumblr: a User’s Guide #(the following category tags were added retroactively:) #Wordpress #Fediverse

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~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

itsbenedict:

everyone’s posting their links to the other social media they’re active on in case their tumblr gets deleted in the latest and greatest ill-conceived ineffectual attempt to algorithmically combat pornbot spam

so in case my tumblr gets deleted for some reason, here is all the other social media i use:

  • none. really hope my blog doesn’t get deleted

I don’t *currently* have any other sites, but in the event of a Tumblr shutdown–either of me personally or of everyone–you can probably figure out where I’ve moved to by googling my username.

“But Brin, doesn’t your blogging style rely heavily on being able to link to your previous posts?”, you ask. That’s where the WordPress export comes in!

Unlike a lot of blogs that claim to take Tumblr imports, WordPress includes reblogs and images. My WordPress is currently private, mostly because the formatting is fucked up in ways that would be simple but tedious to fix (tags insist on displaying on alphabetical order, which scrambles the commentary; intra-blog links link to the Tumblr copy and not the WordPress copy): if the original Tumblr copy vanishes I will go through the whole thing, clean it up (moving commentary tags into the main post body), and mark it public. If anyone else reading this wants to be more reliably able to link people to their old posts, I recommend a WordPress backup.

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While I back up my Tumblr to my laptop daily, and to my phone weekly, I’d only done a WordPress backup once ages ago. Thanks for the reminder to add it to my routine backup schedule: I’d hate to be unable to link people to old posts, or to have to figure out how to host the local copy in a reasonably linkable way.

—

(Sorry for getting my seriousness in your joke(?) post, but it inspired me.)

Tags:

#Tumblr: a User’s Guide #The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #amnesia cw #reply via reblog #(every time I suggest backups as a solution to something Dad scoffs and says that nobody actually does those) #(he keeps doing this even though I always respond with ”…*I* do them”) #(if my laptop abruptly fails again it’ll suck having to buy new hardware but that’s all it’ll be: new *hardware*)

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

Did you know that when writing a post, you can rearrange the order of the post’s tags by dragging them?

I just realised this, and it looks very helpful for fixing typos in tag rambles: just write a corrected version of the tag and drag it into place.

(though I might still continue writing my longer tag rambles out in a notepad window and then pasting them in)

Tags:

#Tumblr: a User’s Guide #oh look an original post #the first two tags on this post were originally in the opposite order #just because I could #the more you know