Tumblr: Difference between revisions

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Tumblr is a popular content hosting silo, especially for found images & video, that explicitly supports multiple types of posts, and through free domain mapping, a content hosting service as well.

How to

POSSE to Tumblr

Tumblr used to be able to import an RSS feed (dates? citations?).

How are people POSSEing to Tumblr today? Presumably using their API? Or email?

POSSE Reposts of Tumblr posts

When posting a repost of a Tumblr post, the proper POSSE behavior should be to do a native repost (on Tumblr) of the post that you're reposting on your own site.

IndieWeb community members doing this:

acegiak is doing this as of 2014-050 per claim[1]
- Example of original repost: [2]
- Example of POSSE repost on Tumblr: [3]

Considerations: Reblogging specifically has to be done through the [4] which requires oauth and cannot be done through their email posting service. This is because posting a reblog requires the system to first api fetch the original post that is being reblogged to get it's "reblog_key" that must be sent with it's post id when making the reblog call.

POSSE Reposts to Tumblr

When you do a repost of an indieweb post:

look for a rel-syndication hyperlink on the indieweb post permalink page to a Tumblr.com post URL
if there is such a rel-syndication hyperlink with href linking to a Tumblr.com post URL
then
- do a native repost of that Tumblr post URL on Tumblr itself
end if

POSSE Favorites of Tumblr posts

When posting a favorite of a Tumblr post, the proper POSSE behavior should be to natively "like" (on Tumblr) the Tumblr post that you're favoriting on your own site.

POSSE Favorites to Tumblr

When you post a favorite of an indieweb post:

look for a rel-syndication hyperlink on the indieweb post permalink page to a Tumblr.com post URL
if there is such a rel-syndication hyperlink with href linking to a Tumblr post URL
then
- natively "like" that Tumblr post URL on Tumblr itself
end if

Add rel-me links and use IndieAuth

On your Tumblr page, click the Customize button, then add rel-me links as HTML directly in the Description section. More details.

You can use this snippet to do so:

<code>
{block:Description}
<meta name="description" content="{MetaDescription}" />
-<a href=" --Link to Site Goes Here--" rel="me">--Site Name Goes Here--</a>
{/block:Description}
</code>

Add microformats support

Tumblr has documentation on How to create a custom HTML theme which you can use to add microformats support, especially h-entry and h-card.

There is a indie web version theme already marked up that you can use. Click on the customize link and copy and paste this over the existing html.

Go to your Tumblr URL, e.g. yourname.tumblr.com
Click the "Customize" link/button with the wrench icon (usually in top right)
Click the (Edit HTML) button
add h-entry
1. scroll down and find all instances of <article class="single_post">

1. change them to <article class="single_post h-entry">
2. scroll down and find all instances of class="post_date"
3. change them to <div class="post_date dt-published">
4. you may need to update their contents to publish the date and time in ISO format, using the value class pattern etc. These macros may help with that: {Year}-{MonthNumberWithZero}-{DayOfMonthWithZero} {24HourWithZero}:{Minutes}:{Seconds}
5. change href="{Permalink}" to: class="u-url" href="{Permalink}"
6. change href="{permalink}" to: class="u-url" href="{permalink}"

You can use the Link feature of Tumblr to send indieweb replies:

Find the section starting block:Link and change it so it looks like this.

{block:Link}
<article class="single_post_wrap">
    
    <article class="single_post h-entry">   

        {block:Date}  
        <h3 class="post_date dt-published">{TimeAgo}</h3>
        {/block:Date} 

                 
        <h2><a class="u-in-reply-to" href="{URL}">{Name}</a></h2>
   
        {block:Description} 
        <div class="description e-content" >{Description}</div>                                                                                                  
        {/block:Description}

To reply to something copy the URL and make it a tumblr link. You will need to manually send webmentions or sign up for Brid.gy

You can also mark up your photos and photosets with microformats.

Look for img src="{PhotoURL-500}" alt="{PhotoAlt}" and change it to: img class="u-photo" src="{PhotoURL-500}" alt="{PhotoAlt}" .

Example Tumblrs with microformats

The following Tumblrs have proper h-entry markup (per the above instructions) and thus may help as examples:

http://tantek.tumblr.com/ (also uses <link rel=author> for site and post authorship)
http://andthenitcametotheend.tumblr.com/ uses the indieweb tumblr theme mentioned above.
http://days.maybemaimed.com (uses a free IndieWeb-ified Tumblr theme called "Resting Crane")

Add webmention support

Tumblr doesn't have built in support for webmentions, but Bridgy can send, receive, and display webmentions for Tumblr blogs. You can also receive webmentions with webmention.io and webmention.herokuapp.com.

Export

Tumblr's v1 read API is blissfully simple to use although now deprecated. It returns custom XML but it is fairly straightforward to transform this into HTML etc.

See documentation.

tommorris ported most of his content over from Tumblr.

PESETAS

Getting data out of Tumblr is pretty easy as documented above. There is no need to get or use API keys or OAuth tokens or anything.

This makes Tumblr a logical destination silo for a PESETAS setup.

Feeds

Public feeds are available of Tumblr sites at the path "/rss", e.g.:

http://tantek.tumblr.com/rss

Porting to the IndieWeb

Challenges

porting over content and maintaining URL redirects
porting over comments
porting over reblogs
porting over likes

Export Your Posts

The Tumblr API provides XML and JSON for posts. The v1 API doesn't require authentication. documentation
...

Mapping of Tumblr post types to ActivityStreams

Tumblr posts can be roughly mapped to ActivityStreams object types as follows:

text: note or article (depending on length)
quote: quotation
photo: photo
chat: ???
video: video
audio: audio

Users own their content

The Tumblr TOS assert that users retain ownership and copyright over all content and IP they post. Details in section 6, Content and Subscriber Content. (Checked 2014-07-21.)

UI/process documentation

Tumblr allows users to set-up auto-syndication of Tumblr posts to Twitter. The UI used for this may be of some use to those implementing POSSE (although it isn't POSSE as Tumblr isn't your "own site"). See this Webapps StackExchange post for details of the UI of Tumblr's Twitter syndication.

Criticisms

Downtime

2010-340 16:24:41-0800 (PST) "issue in ... database cluster"

Poor Quote Post Presentation

In the dashboard view of your own quote post, it looks like you're quoting yourself, which is misleading:

Poor Repost Presentation

Even worse, reblogs of a quote post look like they're being said by the reblogger, which is doubly indirectly wrong.

DMCA takedowns without merit

Like many of the other silos, Tumblr will comply to DMCA takedown requests quickly and without warning, regardless of their merit.
- Randy McQueen filed numerous DMCA complaints with Tumblr in order to remove posts that were critical of his artwork (even though art criticism within Fair Use) [5]

Blocked Feedreader Bloglovin

Tumblr has blocked at least one feed reader (Bloglovin) from accessing their feeds, see Tumblr blocks Bloglovin

@@ Line 151: / Line 151: @@
 == Users own their content ==
 The [https://www.tumblr.com/policy/en/terms-of-service Tumblr TOS] assert that users retain ownership and copyright over all content and IP they post. Details in section 6, Content and Subscriber Content. (Checked 2014-07-21.)
 == Criticisms ==