Totally apropos, within 30 minutes of sitting down to chat with Digg CEO Jay Adelson (who we just learned is a native New Yorker), we hit the Digg front page. The story is actually a link to a very cool in-depth Lifehacker article on Tumblr. We’re long time fans of Lifehacker (they broke the story on Channel Frederator when we launched in ’05) and we were thrilled to read Gina Trapani‘s thorough account of her experience with Tumblr. It just so happens she runs the second most popular tumblelog, scribbling.net, just behind Leo Laporte.
In other happenings, project.ioni.st posted a scan of the Chicago Trib article that mistakenly captioned them as being powered by Tumblr. We made it very clear in our interview that project.ioni.st was our inspiration, and stole our hearts about 14 months prior to developing Tumblr. Oh well — the project.ioni.st folks took it in good spirit, and were kind enough to give us a shout-out :-)
Despite the torrent of recent attention, we have actually managed to get some work done. Some of the changes to look out for early next week:
- Write API is done.
- Bookmarklet is using rich text editing again in all fields.
- Tumblr.com now features “Today’s Popular Tumblelogs”, refreshed nightly.
- You can now change your account email address from the Settings page.
- The Tumblr RSS crawler now sends the “If-Modified-Since” header to play nicer with cached feeds. (Thanks for reminding us, Nelson M.!)
- HTML filtering no longer strips H-tags (H1, H2, H3…).
- Mobile photo uploads are getting smarter and should be stripping more of the junk text that cell carriers send. (Mobile Text posting coming very soon!)
- And some other big things should be hitting beta for you guys to play with very soon.
Let’s hear it for Marco for keeping the site up during the storm of Digg users without so much as a hiccup! You never fail to amaze me.
Davidville 
Congrats Team Tumblr. Some well deserved recognition for y’all. Love your creation and love using it. Hope the kudos keep rolling in.
/gratz
Rock on guys
Way to go guys. Hopefully no Digg effect :). Haven’t seen anything.
On the flip side, my descriptions are still not showing up :(
It’s because Tumblr rocks. I’ve never used a service that’s just so easy to use. The UI is easy but not stupid or stripped down — it lets you do exactly what you want to do and need to do. The bookmarklet is a work of art. I wouldn’t use Tumblr nearly as much as I do if it wasn’t for the sheer simplicity of posting with it. You guys have made an amazing service, and it looks like it’s only going to get better. Keep it up!
Also, the sooner the API comes out, the better. I can’t wait to integrate Tumblr and Quicksilver with AppleScript spackle.
Deepak: If you’re using a custom theme, make sure you add the description block:
{block:Description}{Description}{/block:Description}
I believe this was discussed in the comments here: http://blog.davidville.com/2007/03/16/we-almost-had-nice-weather/
GreySheepDuo: I think we’re just as excited as you are :-)
We totally overlooked QS as a platform to integrate. That could prove dangerously cool. Make sure you shoot us an email so we can feature it.
Looking forward to many wicked API applications — thank you!
Yay, Marco! Yay, Tumblr!
Congratulations David and Marco!!
Saw you guys changing the blog layout. My favorite was “Sleepless.” I was wondering if you were planning on introducing any features for tracking readers, RSS subscribers, hits, etc.? Statistics like this would be really nice.
Thanks for the input GreySheep :)
I’m not crazy about the current theme, but all of the others had minor issues that drive me crazy. I’d love to put together a custom theme some day, but I’m afraid it’s very hard to justify installing and configuring a local WP install when WordPress.com does such a good job.
On stats – maybe. We haven’t really thought about it. Since our blog isn’t necessarily a business in itself (unlike the broader writing you see on blogs like Signal Vs. Noise), we don’t see any real value in publicizing our numbers.
We’ve actually been giving a lot of thought to setting up some sort of central forum for you guys to knock around ideas for Tumblr, and act as some level of community support. We think we’ve just about hit a volume where we could comfortably do this. Does that strike a chord, or just sound lame?
I meant getting stats set up for our tumblelogs, actually. I didn’t really make that clear.
As for a forum, yeah, that would rock. Pretty hard. You guys, as a company, are really good at listening to what we say and working on it. That’s totally awesome and you should keep it up. You’re real people, not a corporation or company.
Actually, I’m a robot. All of my code is generated by feeding SCIgen papers into the hatch computer on Lost and seeing what cyber-Walt comes up with.
We’ve started looking into providing stats on tumblelogs. It took a low priority in this very busy week, but we’ll have a better idea of what we’re doing with stats soon.
Forum is good.
We definitely need a forum.
I’m also interested in knowing if Tumblr could have post timestamps (full date and hour) and a way to search through someone’s Tumblr blog added.
Following the helpful instructions from the Tumblr support message, I hereby present my Tumblr and Quicksilver integration. You can find it at http://www.greysheepduo.com/quicksilvertumblr/ with instructions and code. Enjoy!
I noticed tumblr entries don’t show the TIME of the entry. Is this going to be added at any time soon? or a setting that we can use to toggle?
Hey hey.. Great news on the API. Gonna get busy on writing stuff for it.
One thing missing in the API though. The ability to edit and delete and so on. Nothing really important in a way.
Looks like fun. Congrats on your launch. The digital nomads should like it, and I will make a post.
Woo-freaking-HOO! S’about time that write API got finished. *grin*
I’ve got my nice little copy of Ecto.
I’ve got my nice little twitter updater.
I’ve got my nice little LiveJournal client.
…I’m just missing Tumblr.
I’m one of those guys who wants to do as little as possible through the browser. Heck, I still use a Gopher client for research when I can (and that’s getting more and more rare these days).
Is anyone else having problems with links not opening in a new window when that option box is checked?
Tumblr seems to be having some problems right now… …at least the administrative panel/pages/bookmarklets are non-responsive as I write this…
Oh, and dare I ask for “search” functionality?
Or what are others using (besides rolling my own, which I’m not adverse too…) besides google, which really seems to be hit and miss on the indexing deal…
naum: There aren’t any current issues that we’re aware of. The Tumblr servers are performing normally. Is the problem persisting? Feel absolutely free to shoot us an email if you’re still having trouble. Thanks.
And Search is in the works. Probably a couple weeks out, though. So it might be worth tossing up a Google box if you need it right away.
Hmm, seems to be working now, might be localized to a specific URL ( http://www.theapplicationdeliverynetwork.com/?p=25 ) that seemed to cause bookmarklet to hang and even calling up admin page after that…
As I write this, same behavior is displaying…
Thanks for the quick response. Don’t mean to gripe at all… :)
Hi David,
I was glad to see you were quick to answer “naum.” Any thoughts on why links are not opening in new windows?
TM
Hi TM –
We entered a ticket to investigate the issue. Sorry for the slow email response — it’s sitting in my queue.
Hi David,
Thanks for the ping.
I look forward to the “open in new window” feature working since we are embedding our tumblelog within our exisiting website – auditoriumA.com.
We worked all night familiarizing ourselves with your service and LOVE it! If we can get the “new window” links working it will be a part of our Version 2.0 release in April.
Also, what kind of “pro” paid features are you thinking about for the future?
Thanks,
TM
Yay for tumblr! I’m also interested in what Pro options you’ll make available. Perhaps you could go for being domain resellers, like integrated into the settings for people who want to buy a domain for their tumblr? Just a thought.
Just hacked together my new tumblr theme with Photoshop and a jpg of a moleskine. I hope it doesn’t break!
Keep it up lads.
first off, tumblr is great! does anyone have any recommendations for saving/backing up the content offline? i’ve kicked around the idea of writing something to save off the rss or /api/read feed but i’m hopeful there’s an easier way.
Hey guys,
Great work — as usual. I would also vote for some sort of stats ability as well, nothing too fancy, but some basics would be nice.
I also like the idea of a backup system as joebo mentioned. I’m thinking with the API that wouldn’t be too hard to write — perhaps something to tinker with in my (or others) spare time.
David
Belated thanks. The descriptions are working now.
Just a quick suggestion. I sent this as part of a support email but the reply said I should post it here too (if I understood it right lol).
For RSS imports of podcast feeds it would be nice if it could display them with an mp3 player pointing at the episode for the entry. Similar to what Google Labs RSS aggregator does with podcast feeds.
Thanks for a great product. It really makes the internet fun.
A couple of niggles that aren’t worth a support mail:
1) A forum or mailing list, *please*.
2) Adding a table to the “about me” box seems to break it.
3) Tags would be nice, but surely 100 people have already said that.
Killer product. I’m hooked.
Hi guys,
Great service. I love the simplicity!!
However I feel I need to have some kind of comments in the entries, or comments in general; to receive feedback from my friends. I know tumblelogs are different but maybe you are thinking on that possibility.
thanks :-)
My support email told me to plop my feature request here to get feedback on it…
currently when we switch from theme to theme, we lose our custom color settings and they reset to the default for that theme. wouldn’t it be better to keep our custom colors? most of the items correspond between each of the themes. then we won’t lose all of the time we spent on colors b/c we want to change the look of our tumblr a little bit. another option would be a toggle button to keep the colors or not when we switch.
I have three requests:
1. Comments for entries
2. Archives
3. Search
Add those three features and I promise I’ll never leave you!
Now this really is a minor niggle – in the ‘photo’ tab of the bookmarklet, could the pictures be about twice the size? The resolution is fine as it is, but the actual thumbnails should be bigger.
For an example of creative theming you can do with a tumblelog, pop on over to http://gondaba.tumblr.com/
Lots of javascript+CSS=magic!
Is it possible to configure bookmarking instruments into tumblr interface like digg this, stumble etc. ???
Cool…
I love the new tumblr. I only had had time to get used to the old tumblr when the new one came out ;)
Just one thing that doesn’t work for me is the RSS.
It used to work fine but now it hasn’t published anything except for twitter! And it changes the options I choose, links and text instead of photos, for example
thanks youu all
is it possible for making sip client using Flash 8 application
Looks like fun. Congrats on your launch.Grettings..
Is it possible to configure bookmarking instruments into tumblr interface like digg this…
Thanks for all..
Nice work and comments..Good job…
Good advice. Thanks…
Good job.Grettings..
Nice work..Thanks..
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