Bugs squashed, some new toys, and some very creative users

Lots of stuff happening this week, and your feedback has been overwhelming! Please keep it coming.

Today we’re pushing some bug fixes, and a new Beta feature for you to play with.

Updates

• Permalinks are now incorporated in all stock themes.
• Timezones are now being correctly reflected.
• Feed importing is now MUCH faster thanks to Marco’s brilliant parallel RSS crawler. Note: We are still respecting each feed’s individual TTL. Del.icio.us feeds are being updated on 30-minute intervals per their request.
• Newly added feeds are now crawled as quickly as possible for instant feedback.
• We’re no longer adding line-breaks to imported posts that are already HTML-formatted. This is retroactive and should make some imported Regular Posts look nicer.
• The {Permalink} tag can now be used much more flexibly in custom themes. This is a fix for users that were having trouble putting Permalinks in the “date” block.
• The “Dreamscape” theme now displays the tumblelog’s description.

Now in Beta

We’re ready to start testing a new feature that should make it even easier to post to Tumblr. You’ll now see a section on your Settings page labeled “Mobile Uploads“. This will give you an address to send photos (text posts coming soon!) to your tumblelog directly from you phone.

Each address is unique, so don’t share it. Just add it to your address book and use your phone’s built-in messaging to send a photo to Tumblr. If you want to send a caption along with the photo, just type it in the Subject line.

A reminder that this feature is still in beta. We’re hoping to work out any remaining kinks this week. So please pass along any bugs to support@tumblr.com.

For more information on sending photos from you phone, please visit your cellular provider’s support page.

Interesting Tumblings

Nothing’s been more exciting to us than seeing all of the incredibly clever ways you guys are using Tumblr. We’ll try and feature the cool things we find as often as we can.

• Last week we got to welcome Leo Laporte and Merlin Mann.
• Matt Decker shows off some serious custom-theme integration.
• CBlog.org chronicles popular new and past cartoons.
• Sam Schenkman-Moore shows us some gorgeous code-snippets.
• Some very cool custom-themes on matthasalotof ideas, contrived chaos, Tumblrweeb Connection, Application Error, AZspot, Iridescent, loud thoughts, Organized Ignorance, and karrderized. (just a few of the ones we’ve come across!)

If there’s anything cool you’d like to show off, please drop it in the comments!

Also, we wanted to let you know that we’ve heard your requests for importing feed excerpts and Link Post descriptions. We’re playing with some things.

We hear you!

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.