All posts from June 18, 2008
“The Celtics squeaked past the Lakers to win Game 6. Unfortunately, they also managed to play the first 20 minutes of Game 7, too.”
That's why there's chocolate and vanilla
It’s fascinating to me how changes to something that people use frequently can be so polarizing. Marco criticizes some of the changes in Firefox 3. I won’t comment on the OS X UI changes, since I’ve become a poor and forlorn lost soul, but I think his take on the Awesome Bar and bookmarking changes are interesting since I have such an opposite opinion. I think those are both big improvements.
Marco says:
They want me to input “tags” everywhere (honestly guys, nobody except geeks knows what tags are). The Awesome Bar is a disaster.
I’m going to take them in reverse order because I think the Awesome Bar is…well, awesome, and there seems to be no ambivalence about it. People either wholeheartedly love it or fanatically hate it.
I use it a lot like I used to use Quicksilver. When I want
to get to the Tumblr dashboard, I just enter dash, the down
error and Enter. It’s already ingrained in my muscle memory. In
Safari I have to enter tum and then arrow down through all the
results to pick out the dashboard from the list. The Awesome Bar
learns all the shortcuts I like and gives them preference.
I think it’s awfully useful that it searches through bookmarks, particularly their titles, as well. It’s one stop shopping for navigating to a site, whether I want to enter the whole URL, or find the site out of my bookmarks or history with a search term that makes sense to me.
When it comes to bookmarking, I agree with Marco that most people probably don’t understand nor care for tags, but I think the new interface takes that squarely into account. They’ve streamlined the way you deal with bookmarks.
In the new system, to bookmark a page, you just click the star in the location bar. If you want…that’s it, you’re done, no tagging whatsoever. I think that’s a great simplification from the previous system, which brought up a dialog box forcing you to decide, then and there, where to drop the bookmark in your hierarchy.
I reckon that a whole lot of people (many of the same people who don’t care about tags) don’t care to organize their bookmarks much. This interface is simple for them. Those folks who do want more organization, to tag or move the bookmark somewhere in their hierarchy, just click the star a second time to add that information. It seems to me they’ve struck an excellent balance between those two types of bookmarkers.
That’s my take, but regardless, it’s intriguing to see how different people are reacting to these changes. Incidentally, both of these features were borrowed, at least partially, from Flock, a terrific and, I think, visionary browser.
Reblogging suggestions
I think reblogging is a great feature at Tumblr. I’ve been arguing for years that commments, trackbacks, etc. are largely unnecessary on a web where anyone can easily have their own site. The genesis of weblogging is in the reblog; the first weblogs were curated compendiums of links to other, interesting finds on the web.
The features at Tumblr surrounding reblogs add a lot of value to the concept. I’ve got a few ideas that I think would add more.
As it stands, when reblogging a text post, you can change it to a link or a quote. I’m not sure I understand the restriction. I’d like to be able to reblog any type of post and change it to any other. Often someone will quote an article and I want to reblog their post, but I’d rather it be a link to the article on my site. Or perhaps they’ve linked to something where I find a photo that I’d love to post as a reblog of their initial link.
I like the idea of reblogging because it preserves the chain of discovery and provides that chain in the dashboard, but I’d like to be free to reblog as any type of post I find appropriate.
I’d also like to see the ability to look at the reblog history of any post. I can see it in my dashboard, but I’d like to be able to see it even in the entries of people I don’t follow, and I’d like to show it to people visiting my site who may not be Tumblr subscribers.
There are some hacks around to make this happen, and people
have noticed that David and Marco have it baked into
their tumblelogs. I’m hoping that means there are template tags
coming down the pipe that we can all include in our themes. I’d
also like to see a bookmarklet, or a button on the Tumblr
iFrame that would let me view the reblog history of a post
whose author has chosen not to include it in the site (assuming
that feature is coming).
Barring (or maybe even in addition to) the above suggestion, I’d like a way to follow the reblogs on a post over time in my dashboard. The way things are, to follow the reblogging on a post, you have to continuously search it out and find it in your dashboard. That becomes pretty difficult if you follow more than even a few people because the post you’re interested in is quickly buried in the previous dashboard pages.
It’d be nice to be able to favorite or star a post in your dashboard and have an easy way of filtering for those posts later. This would make following the reblog discussion of a post a lot easier, and regardless of that desire, I think it would be a convenient way to find your favorite Tumblr pearls later.
The way I deal with this now is to reblog the post into a private group of favorites. That way I can easily find it later. That’s serviceable, but better filtering in the dashboard would be a boon.
I’m sure none of this is new or shocking to the big brains. I bet they’ve got some, all, or even better things coming to us soon.