Tumblr Dislikes Firefox

Tumblr supports Chrome a lot better than it supports Firefox. When they introduce a new feature, or change something, it usually works in Chrome from the beginning, but may take quite some time till it works in Firefox. Such was the case, for example, with the new editor introduced earlier this year.

Now there’s something especially weird. The Esquire theme (I use it for Vivat Crescat Floreat, Thirteen to Fifty, and The Latin World) shows an ugly anthracite bar at the top of the page—in Firefox, but not in Chrome.

The Tumblr is Gone

I’m not exactly sure what happened, but the Tumblr for Download Central, that I announced in the previous post, is suddenly gone. I didn’t delete it. I was notified by Tumblr that there were strange goings-on in my account, and prompted to change my password, which I did. Should someone actually have hacked the account and deleted the Tumblr? It seems rather silly.

I can’t simply start it again at the same URL, it is blocked now, and in any case all the posts would be gone. I’m not sure if I will take steps to restore it. For now, it’s gone.

A Tumblr for Download Central

A week ago I started a Tumblr for Download Central. Meanwhile it has 24 posts and is quite presentable, so I’m presenting it here.

I made it mainly as an easy way for people who are on Tumblr to follow the updates on Download Central. I post every new upload as a photo post, usually with the original screenshot, in some rare cases I resize it to 4:3. New lists or sections are posted as a link.

But besides, I intend it to grow into a sort of database. In between the updates, I post older files too. I tag each post rather extensively, basically most of what I write into the “Steckbrief” on the site itself. It will take some time, but in a couple of months most of the site should be covered.

Update 2013-01-16: The Tumblr has been deleted, not sure by whom, not sure why, but it’s gone.

Some Tumblr Themes

The Tumblr Theme Garden is huge, and unlike its WordPress counterpart not tagged by feature. Here are a couple of themes that I found useful. The things I look out for in a theme are:

• Tags should display on listings, not just on the posts themselves. Otherwise your blog will be difficult to navigate.
• The short URL should be displayed somewhere. It is sufficient if it is displayed on the posts, but if the theme does not display it, it isn’t accessible at all.
• The theme should handle long tag lists well.
• It should load fast and without problems. For this reason I generally prefer themes that do not show the high-resolution images immediately.
• It should display cover images for audio posts, ideally at a fixed size. This is of course only relevant if the blog will have audio posts.
• Ideally, it should display “next post” and “previous post” links.

Tumblr-style Commons

A big problem with all wiki-based projects is that the contributors must achieve consensus. The problem is bigger on text-centered wikis where the main content is a product of the community. A lot of articles on Wikipedia got deleted (and are thus lost forever) due to obscure notability criteria. Passages in articles get deleted (and are then difficult to find) because the contributors can’t agree with them.

Tumblr, a new take on the Web

I’m getting increasingly fascinated with Tumblr. It’s more than just one new service, and it isn’t sufficiently described as a microblogging platform.

The way the web worked for the first ten, fifteen years was with individual webspace. Initially, it was typically a few megabyte you got from your university, your ISP, or some free host. Later, commercial hosting became more common. It doesn’t make much difference. You had some space, you put things in. Inlining images from another server was technically never a problem, but soon became frowned upon: Bandwidth theft. Webmasters linked to each other. Over time, surfers relied more and more on search engines to find what they wanted. The rise of CMS and blogging software didn’t change much. The system was still the same.

Two Months on Tumblr

2,267 posts, 101 followers. My first post was Raphael’s portrait of Julius II.

What people on Tumblr like

After two months and more than two thousand posts on Tumblr I notice that just as before with the games, it still comes as a surprise to me what gets lots of reblogs and likes and what doesn’t. Tumblr does not list posts by popularity, or I haven’t found the way yet, so I checked those where I remembered manually.

Tumblr is something else

I’ve been on Tumblr now for about two weeks, with an average of ten posts per day. What I wrote in my earlier comparison mostly holds true, but on the whole Tumblr became a completely new experience.

Mobile devices bring back simple web design

There was a time when web sites became huge, sprawling, multi-column things. They looked like a newspaper. Nearly all sites created with Joomla do. Joomla was first introduced 2005, the time when desktop sizes increased radically and fast. A few years earlier, 1024×768 had been something like the standard resolution.