Chez Moncef

I just found a major bug in the Tumblr Backup desktop app for Mac (which you can download from Tumblr’s Goodies page): you can’t back up any of your blogs that have queued posts. If you try, you will get this error: ”API request failed. Please check your internet connection or try again later.” 

The only solution that I know of is to empty your queue (by saving the posts as drafts or publishing them, for example), which is far from ideal. I’ve submitted a bug report, so hopefully they’ll fix it soon.

Matthew Buchanan developed TumblePhone last summer, but I just found out about it while browsing Aja Wests’s anyways.us (even though I’ve visited Matthew’s site several times in the past few months).  It’s dead simple to use. Just tell iPhone users to go to: http://www.tumblephone.com/[your Tumblr username]

Here is what http://www.tumblephone.com/monfresh looks like on my iPhone:

And here is what one of my recent photo posts looks like:

Sadly, audio posts don’t seem to work. I get this when I click on an audio link:

Hi everyone. I’m not sure when the Tumblr search issues started happening, but I just noticed today. I tried to look up some of my posts using the Dashboard search field and the search field on my site, but could not find them. Can you guys try searching for your own posts and let me know if it’s working for you? Please try different keywords and make sure all the posts containing those keywords show up. Thanks.

Sorry for the long post, but I need your help to get Tumblr’s attention. I’ve highlighted the important parts in bold if you don’t have time to read everything.

I love Tumblr’s community/social networking features: liking, reblogging, following and the ability to find other tumblelogs via the Directory, Radar and Map. These features help drive traffic to your site. The day I was listed on the Directory and Staff Picks (thanks Tumblr staff!), I saw a huge spike in visitors, and having several of my posts featured on the radar has given me a steady stream of followers - over 100 now and I’ve only been posting for a little over 2 months!

However, what’s important to note is that if my site wasn’t featured in the Directory, Staff Picks or Radar, I would definitely not have as many visitors. And that’s a big problem. There are millions of people who don’t purposefully go to Tumblr to look for blogs. Those people use search engines to find sites. I want those people to be able to find my tumblelog, and so should you. According to my Google Analytics for last month, less than 5% of the traffic for chezmoncef.com came from search engines (most traffic came from the Tumblr Directory and Radar). Whereas my monfresh.com site (which uses Wordpress) received 43% of traffic from search engines!

chezmoncef.com traffic sources:

monfresh.com traffic sources:

One of the most important parts of a web page in terms of search engine ranking is the title tag: the text that appears at the top of your browser window when you’re on any given page. Yet, Tumblr only lets you add a title to 2 types of posts: text and chat, which are arguably the least popular types of posts. I realize it doesn’t make sense to have a title displayed on the post page itself alongside a quote for example. What I’m asking for is a section in the Advanced options that allows you to set a custom post title, just like you can set a custom post URL. This custom title setting would only affect the title tag of your post, and would greatly improve your site’s SEO (search engine optimization).

About a year ago, Tumblr made a few changes and added the custom post URL option and the {PostSummary} theme tag to improve search engine ranking. But this only happened because they noticed a lot of people complaining. Why they didn’t implement SEO from day one and why they still haven’t added a custom post title option is beyond me. Especially since the {PostTitle} tag is already in place!! Here’s a quote from last year’s post:

We’ve also added the theme tag, {PostSummary}. This is an alternative to the {PostTitle} tag (used on permalink pages) that will generate a short text summary if the post doesn’t have a title. 

Read that last part I highlighted in bold again. If the post doesn’t have a title. I don’t know about you, but when I read that, it only means one thing to me: that I have the option to give any post its own title, and if I don’t type a title, then the first few words of my post will be used for the title tag.

Tumblr claims that this {PostSummary} tag helps search engines index your posts, when in most cases, it pretty much guarantees they will never appear in Google’s search results. Here is a perfect example from my most popular post to date:

When I post a photo, I don’t necessarily include a description of the photo. Some people don’t write anything at all. But for SEO purposes, you do want a title tag that is separate from your post summary/description. With my title tag for this picture set to “Here’s another one from my StumbleUpon archives”, do you think there’s any chance whatsoever that it will show up in Google search results? Exactly. Even if I search for “sperm spoons swimming towards egg”, which is the custom URL for this post, it is nowhere to be found in Google’s Web or Images results.

There are already several posts on Get Satisfaction on this topic, but mine has the most traction right now. What I would like you to do, please, is help me spread the word about this very important feature which should be a no-brainer for Tumblr to implement. Please reblog, twitter about it, contact Tumblr staff, however you want to do it. Let’s make this happen!

I follow sabino. He reblogged a post by pinupsundae who lists this as one of the things that irks her about Tumblr:

People who post stuff I’m interested in, but on a scale of like 10 pages a day. That’s dashboard flooding. I only follow about 45 people, I like to not have a million pages to catch up on every day.

Dashboard flooding? Seriously? You do realize that you made a conscious decision to follow those people, right? Complaining about the high volume of posts is like standing in the bullring entrance in Pamplona in July and wondering why you keep getting trampled.

staff:

We’re about to start rolling out a bunch of features focused on interaction between tumblelog authors and their readers.  Post notes are going to be the glue for all of this interaction, so we’d like to ask all theme designers (and anyone with custom themes) to incorporate this new tag:

{PostNotes}

This will render the post’s notes (including reblogs and likes) on their permalink pages.  Check out an example on my tumblelog.

Unlike our other theme tags, this outputs generic HTML markup, so all you need to do is style it with CSS.  Here’s a basic stylesheet to get you started:

ol.notes {
    padding: 0px;
    margin: 25px 0px;
    list-style-type: none;
    border-bottom: solid 1px #ccc;
}

ol.notes li.note {
    border-top: solid 1px #ccc;
    padding: 10px;
}

ol.notes li.note img.avatar {
    vertical-align: -4px;
    margin-right: 10px;
    width: 16px;
    height: 16px;
}

ol.notes li.note span.action {
    font-weight: bold;
}

ol.notes li.note .answer_content {
    font-weight: normal;
}

ol.notes li.note blockquote {
    border-color: #eee;
    padding: 4px 10px;
    margin: 10px 0px 0px 25px;
}

ol.notes li.note blockquote a {
    text-decoration: none;
}

You can get the full documentation (including complementary tags like {NoteCount}) on the Custom Themes page.

Here’s an example of what notes look like on a popular post.