PHOTOGABBLE // BLOG POST

The problem I have with tumblr.

January 23rd, 2008

Very recently I have been shown a some what new micro-format called tumblr, it’s basically an online service where simple blogs are hosted based around the basic prospect of posting content under the following media categories: Text, Photo, Quote, Link, Chat, Audio and Video. Many of the tumblrs I have visited are an informal affair quite different to the carefully thought out and planned posts to be found in typical blogs, this makes for easy viewing as they are mostly made up of images with comments, quotes, interesting links with little commentary, funny lines from chat logs and the odd mp3 and video to listen to and watch. This is all well and good and actually something I have enjoyed being a part of however there is just one nagging problem I have with tumblr and that is its appalling RSS feed syndication support.

I like all my content to be based in one location and that location is photogabble, this is why I don’t use flickr or any other sort of community thing to publish my work through (other than deviantart). As you can guess this also means that although I really like being part of the tumblr community, I’d rather not have my content be just there and syndicated on photogabble. Instead I have opted for creating a new category called tumblrs on here and syndicated that feed on tumblr a feature which upon realising, I was very pleased and impressed with. However there are two problems with tumblrs’ feeds both with production and syndication. Impressively it can import any RSS feed you give it with the following fixed settings: Import as links, links with description, text without titles or photos. Initially I can see one distinct problem with that listing, the lack of importing text with titles however I looked beyond this and tried it out. This is where I hit a snag, one would expect that if you asked tumblr to import text without titles then it would import everything from the <content:encoded> tag and ignore the rest. Retrospectively upon selecting to import as links with description I would expect it to import the <title> and <description> tags, I suppose in that case it probably is what happens however my biggest problem with tumblrs syndication is that when I choose import text without titles it doesn’t collect from the content tag, rather choosing to stick with the description tag which makes absolutely no sense at all because the description is truncated at a certain word length and with no link back to the original all I’m going to get on my tumblr is a bunch of half posts with no link to source.

You may well realise that this is a huge problem and one which should be remedied, however my second problem with tumblrs’ feeds is with the production as they just don’t validate and make it very difficult for me to write a script plugin for wordpress so I can import all my tumblrs from tumblr and place them in my tumblrs category here, a method which would give me greater control over my content even though it would mean having to publish from the tumblr dashboard rather than all (blog and tumblrs) from the wordpress dashboard.

Lastly I believe my love affair with tumblr could become solidified if the ability to import text with titles was introduced and this bug of importing descriptions rather than content where to be fixed. Other than that it is an amazing service with a awesome user base to which I have no further disagreements with.

¬ SHARE

Tags: rant, review, tumblr