Tumblr Staff

Yesterday, Amit Gupta had a great suggestion to include...

Fri, 16 May 2008 10:38:27 -0400

Yesterday, Amit Gupta had a great suggestion to include thumbnails on Video posts in the Dashboard:

I love Tumblr, but I almost never watch the videos people post. But I click on photos to see the bigger version all the time.

Video posts could really use a still frame to give you a peek at what’s inside.

Anyone else feel this way?

We were already doing this with videos uploaded to Tumblr. Now we’ll also show thumbnails next to YouTube videos.

Thanks, Amit!

New feature: Tag filtering

Thu, 15 May 2008 14:54:00 -0400

You’ve been able to enter tags on posts for a while using the “Show advanced options” link. Most people use tags to indicate categories or topics, such as vacation, music, photography.

Today, we’ve added two new ways to use tags:

Tags can now be displayed for each post in your theme (see the Custom Theme reference’s new Tags section). You can link to URLs that look like this:

http://tumblelog.marco.org/tagged/New_music_experiment

…where you can replace New_music_experiment with your tag name. Underscores in the URL are interpreted as spaces in the name, so that tag was actually entered as "New music experiment".

The standard view shows posts in reverse-chronological order (latest posts on top), like your tumblelog’s front page. If you want the opposite (earliest posts on top), you can append /chrono to any tag URL to display the posts in chronological order, like this:

http://tumblelog.marco.org/tagged/Ohio_trip/chrono

It’s a great way to present all posts relevant to a certain event (in this case, my trip to Ohio) or a category (e.g. "photography tips").

You can link to these URLs in your Description for commonly used tags, or you can link each post to its tags using the new Custom Theme variables.

Login limit increased

Thu, 15 May 2008 14:44:23 -0400

We’ve just increased the number of allowed simultaneous logins from 3 to 5.

This means that you can be logged into Tumblr on 5 different browsers without having to re-enter your email address and password. This is handy if you want to use a home computer, a work computer, a mobile phone, and a laptop — or if you use multiple web browsers on one computer.

As always, you can manually log out from any of the 5 locations without affecting the others. Changing your password will log you out from all other browsers.

Enjoy!

SPOTLIGHT ON: POSTCARDS FROM YO MOMMA Fact: At least ninety...

Thu, 08 May 2008 13:18:00 -0400

SPOTLIGHT ON: POSTCARDS FROM YO MOMMA

Fact: At least ninety percent of the time, online correspondence with one’s mother is terribly amusing.

There is something irresistible about the combination of technical quirks ( “Love, Mom” at the end of IMs), spontaneous and genuine life advice, and e-mails that resemble fourth grade lunch box notes. Postcards From Yo Momma documents these digital moments with emails sent by real readers’ moms, and is so addictive that the blog’s editors just scored a book deal with Hyperion for April 2009.

Check it out, and send in yo momma’s words. Make her proud.

Who’s making it happen?
Jessica Grose / 26 / Editor at Jezebel.com
Doree Shafrir / 29 / Reporter at The NY Observer
(Pictured with their respective mommas, above)

So, what’s PFYM all about?
Postcards From Yo Momma collects emails from people’s moms. It turns out almost all moms sound exactly the same! We came up with the name in 5 minutes on GChat—It seemed to describe what we wanted the site to be but it was also a little silly. PFYM (as we now call it) is all original content, and we put up 10-15 reader submissions every day.

Was it easy to find contributors?
Frighteningly easy—once we put out the word to friends, we were flooded with mother notes, and the majority of them are great. We’ve found that the emails from mothers to daughters tend to be more buddy-buddy, whereas the emails to sons are more naggy and full of reminders.

Do your mothers know about it?
We were actually a little nervous to tell our moms about the blog because we weren’t sure how they’d react (and the first few posts had a bunch of their emails in them). But they both loved it and now read it almost every day.

What are some of your other favorite tumblelogs?
Alex Balk, Tuneage, Garfield Minus Garfield, Perpetua, JessicaLouise, Reverse Cowgirl, and Maura.  

Hello, I'm Rachel.

Thu, 08 May 2008 13:04:00 -0400

Hello everyone, my name is Rachel, but you may already know me as Rach. At the end of April, I will have been on Tumblr for six months. And I will be helping to spotlight some of the great things we’ve been finding.

Here’s how I got involved in this whole business: The night before Halloween last year, I dipped one tentative toe into the waters of Tumblr, posting the scan of a photograph that was hanging over my desk. I had been pointed towards Tumblr by a few converted friends who knew I tend to cover my work area in postcards and sticky notes. It was like having my own high school locker ten years later (with fewer photos of Ryder Strong).

Since then, I have discovered an unexpected (and great) element of Tumblr: you. My dashboard is the first thing I check every morning—I know that if something is newsworthy, or funny, or beautiful, or creepy, or surprising, then one of you has most likely shared it. Keep posting—we notice what you’re up to. And if there’s anything we miss, clue us in at editors@tumblr.com.

Don't laugh at us

Thu, 08 May 2008 12:17:00 -0400

Yes, it’s totally silly that one year after launching Tumblr, we’re moving the official Tumblr blog off of Wordpress because it was too much work to update.

We want to spotlight all of the neat stuff happening on Tumblr. So today we’re announcing the official Tumblr tumblelog: staff.tumblr.com

There’s a lot we want to do here. In addition to showing off the new features we’re building, we’re dying to brag about everything we see you folks doing. To cover it all, we’re inviting some new members of the Tumblr family to contribute. Introductions to follow.

Thanks, everyone!