Alan Jacobs

I just wrote a post about the many, many things I’ve come to hate about Tumblr — I say “come to hate” because many of these problems have been generated by relatively recent changes to the site. It really does seem that there are people at Tumblr who are constantly trying to find ways to make the site more frustrating to use. I am seriously considering moving everything here — though almost no one, I think, sees what I post here, and my Tumblr has a much larger audience. Life is about tradeoffs.

azspot:

ayjay:

A partial list:

1. Tumblr Radar on the Dashboard
2. Recommended Blogs on the Dashboard
3. Occasional promoted content on the website
4. Constant promoted content on the iOS app
5. When I try to post something using the Tumblr bookmarklet on Chrome, I can’t resize the posting window: when I drag it to the size I want, it instantly resizes itself
6. Once I get something posted, instead of a simple confirmation message I get an outrageously, violently animated image of celebration, complete with falling confetti and a leaping avatar, as though I’ve just won the lottery
7. Significantly inconsistent posting behavior among (a) the website, (b) the iOS app, © the share-sheet in iOS — for instance, the iOS app doesn’t recognize Markdown

I just don’t know whether I can put up with this crap any more. There’s so much of it.

Permit me to add:

1. Total bookmarklet failure for an increasing number of sites – when you click on the bookmarklet bar tab and the resultant dialog panel containing url info and highlighted text never returns. Then, I must close that tab, open up a browser tab, and manually fill in a post with all the details. Sort of defeats the raison d'être for Tumblr.
2. The act of reblogging is a far more complex one than simply posting a link or quote – often, your post type is restricted, and then there is addendum content added that grows ever more tricky to format or suppress. I dare say that Tumblr reblogging is more laborious than creating a simple blog post.
3. Default dashboard view doesn’t show my Tumblr blogs. Yes, they’re accessible from a menu pulldown, so this probably falls into the category of minor nitpicking.
4. Search, though it has improved in recent months.
5. “Activity” dashboard panel is nice, but it could be a lot more useful. Also, when you have ~100K followers, the “Latest Notes” scroll is not very useful – a simple filter where I could just see where somebody added text (or content) instead of just all the likes and reblogs would be awesome.

I suppose we all should be thankful and celebrate that since moving to the online place where things go to die, nevertheless, Tumblr is still chugging along.

A partial list:

1. Tumblr Radar on the Dashboard
2. Recommended Blogs on the Dashboard
3. Occasional promoted content on the website
4. Constant promoted content on the iOS app
5. When I try to post something using the Tumblr bookmarklet on Chrome, I can’t resize the posting window: when I drag it to the size I want, it instantly resizes itself
6. Once I get something posted, instead of a simple confirmation message I get an outrageously, violently animated image of celebration, complete with falling confetti and a leaping avatar, as though I’ve just won the lottery
7. Significantly inconsistent posting behavior among (a) the website, (b) the iOS app, © the share-sheet in iOS — for instance, the iOS app doesn’t recognize Markdown

I just don’t know whether I can put up with this crap any more. There’s so much of it.

[caption id=“attachment_15086” align=“aligncenter” width=“1800”] mjlee, “spatial outlaws”[/caption]

[gallery] drawingarchitecture:

moon joo lee, ‘House 6’. pen, color pencil on mylar, newspaper, 36"x24"

[gallery] designclever:

Ana Núñez

ananunez.rocks

Twitter would be a formidable competitor if they had leadership that understood their own product. Zuck uses Facebook confidently and skillfully. There's the difference. Leadership of users, because the top guy is a user.

— Dave Winer. Zuck uses Facebook in a way — protective of his own privacy — that he works very hard to prevent anyone else from doing. It is true that Twitter's leaders don't use and may perhaps not understand their product, but the truly significant difference between them and Zuckerberg is that they aren't as ruthlessly, contemptuously exploitative of their users as Facebook is.

[gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“17994,17995,17996,17997”]

thingsmagazine:

Swissted (via things)

my big fat intellectual project

[gallery] I have just learned, more than two months late, that Barbara Reynolds has died at the age of 100. May she now rest in peace — she rested little enough in her extraordinarily productive life.

I first met Barbara in 1984 at Wheaton College, where I was a new professor and she a frequent visitor to the Wade Center. She was deeply involved in understanding and promoting the Wade authors, especially, of course, Dorothy Sayers; but she also was willing to give talks for the English department whenever she came to campus. Some of these were quite serious and academic, usually on either Sayers or Dante, though once she gave an impenetrably dense and technical account of the teaching of Italian in British universities; but she also cultivated a distinctive and curious role as a comical after-dinner speaker — our “court jester,” as Beatrice Batson, her friend and the chair of the English department, would say. The chief thing I remember about these talks, of which I heard several over the years, was how funny Barbara herself thought they were. She could hardly get through them for giggling.

On that first occasion I sat next to another speaker at that conference, the distinguished poet and critic Donald Davie, who had met Barbara when they both taught at Cambridge twenty years earlier. “I can scarcely believe what I’m hearing,” he whispered to me. “She would never give a talk like this in England.” He seemed lost in thought for a moment, and then shook his head. “We’ve been on committees together from time to time. She’s a formidable woman.” Another pause. “In fact, she’s terrifying.”