Tag Archives: tumblr

Tumblr Changes TOS and Community Standards of Platform.

Today is December 17th and the social blogging platform tumblr has decided to ban all NSFW (not safe for work) content from its platform. In protest, many users have logged out of their accounts in solidarity to show their dismay at the new policy. Since it’s inception, Tumblr has always been a platform that allowed content creators to post adult content, and were always very liberal on their censorship policies. Many users flocked to the platform for that exact reason. It was a place on the net where content creators, artists, and alternative lifestyle bloggers could post their content without fear of being banned or censored.

I’ve used Tumblr on and off for years. I have mixed feelings about the new policy change or TOS (terms of service). I’m not an easily offended person, but I will admit I’ve closed a blog or two, & left the platform on several occasions due to viewing extremely questionable content that I maybe would of rather not seen. For this reason part of me understands why Tumblr is trying to clean up its act, or in their words, “promote a more positive user experience.”

On the other hand, it has always been a platform where you could freely express alternative points of view. Artists who might occasionally sketch a nude found a welcoming home there. People living alternative lifestyles, fetishists, the LGBTQ community, swingers, sex workers, and others all found a welcoming home for their voice and words.

At what cost will this new content policy come though? For years content creators have flocked to the platform for the freedom the platform afforded them. People from all walks of life, and various lifestyles have embraced the platform as a place they could express themselves freely. Now, with a single decision all these bloggers will have to find a new home, or post content that is a little more “sanitized”.

Censorship of any kind is always a slippery slope especially when dealing with adult content. Ask any serious artist, in the eyes of most blogging platforms there is very little difference between artistic expression and pornography when it comes to various depictions of the human naked body.

It’s going to be interesting to see how the users respond to the new TOS and community standards of the platform. Due to the former policies, the platform attracted users looking for a place to post their NSFW and adult content. There aren’t a lot of blogs on the site that don’t post the occasional nude, or some other form of “questionable” content. I feel the platform is isolating a huge chunk of their user base, and straying far from the original idea and concept behind the platform. For this reason I think it’s going to be interesting to see how many users actually stay on the site, how many leave, and what will seperate them now from so many other competitors with the similar content policies. I for one think this is a bad move from the company and feel they may find themselves getting “Myspaced”. They have just changed the one thing that separated them from so many other social blogging competitors. It’s going to be interesting to see how these new policies affect the overall health, and sustainability of the platform.

What you do when you overwrite a website with an older version.

So last night I’m up working on stuff till about 6 a.m. Around 4 in the morning I decide I’m going to tweak my Tumblr blog real quick. I have a special blog on there that I use as a test lab. I make configurations, add stuff, tweak and when every thing looks A O.K. I copy and paste the code into my other blogs that are using the same theme.

So I tweak the theme a bit, I’m happy, I copy the code and paste it into my other blogs not realizing that there were unsaved changes from a previous edit. This was a couple hours work at least, and in a moment of acute stupidity that only took a couple seconds to perpetrate , I overwrote all the changes I had made at an earlier date. To add insult to injury, I couldn’t even find the graphics I had used in my backup. My heart sunk, I was tired, feeling really stupid, and couldn’t believe what I had just done.

Frantically I scoured through the directories on my hard drive, in hopes that I could find the backup files to no avail. In a state of panic I calmed myself and said out loud to no one in particular “o.k. stupid think !” Then it dawned on me, in my moment of desperation I recalled someone talking about a program called time machine or something like that, that stores cached copies of websites on there servers. You just type in the url of the site you want to see, and it pulls up its last cached version of the website. I did a search engine search and low and behold discovered http://www.cachedpages.com/.

I quickly typed in my url and clicked on the Google cache button. To my amazement there was my old site,exactly as I had designed it before my momentary lapse in judgement. The graphics, the new search box, the links, the Twitter widget, the hours of work I had done on the sidebar were all there ! I right clicked on the header image and saved to where I thought the back up file was. I then right clicked on the page again and clicked “view page source” and copied all the code I had overwrote. At last, my world made sense again ! There truly is a God and I gave thanks ! Cachedpages.com saved my REAR and if this ever happens to you, try this because it worked great for me.

Once I got my code and graphics the problems were fixed in under 10 minutes. Words can’t describe how relieved I was. The moral of this story is to always keep backups. I usually do and if this had been a clients page I’m sure I would of known exactly where they were. I tend to be more careful with other peoples stuff, than my own. Plus my Tumblr blogs are just a hobby and somewhere to play when I’m relaxing. I usually keep backups of my backups which go back two changes. So I have the original on the server, a copy on my hard drive, and a copy of the old copy named sitename.bak before changes were made. Using this system, if something goes wrong, 99.9 % of the time it’s completely recoverable.

With that said keep backups, but if the worst should happen check out cachedpages.com or a similar site as a last resort. It really saved my ass !

Add A Twitter Feed To Your Blog Or Website.

I wanted to make my blogs, and websites a little more interactive, and also give people another way to interact with and or contact me. I decided on creating a twitter widget to put in the sidebars of my blogs, and also add to the front page of the website. The process was surprisingly easy. Here’s what you do.

If you don’t have a twitter account you want to go to twitter.com and create an account. O.K. we’ve got our account set up, now go to https://twitter.com/settings/widgets . If you’re not logged into your account, twitter will ask for your username and password and then it should open to a page that has a box that say widgets with a radio button that says “Create New”. Click on create new, and the next page that opens will be the configuration page. Put your @twiiterUserName where it asks for it, and then configure it. If you want replies to show up in your time line then uncheck that box, click whether you want your photo’s to auto-expand or not, adjust your height, theme color, enter your link color hex code or stick with the default, and click create widget. Thats it your done, when the next page loads, cut and paste the code into your blog or website and you’ll have a cool twitter feed, posting all of your updates in real time.

I placed the twitter feed on my Tumblr blog in the sidebar. It’s a custom theme I created so, you’ll have to read the Tumblr documentation to install it in yours. For Tumblr I basically just created another side box and pasted the code into it.

On my website, I did some rewriting of my css to make it responsive to both browsers and phone screens, and using the @media code the widget will even be omitted from smaller displays so the page still displays properly in most devices.

On this wordpress blog, using the 2012 theme, I just clicked on appearance, widgets, dragged a text box over to my sidebar, and pasted the code in the text box. It really couldn’t of been any simpler with wordpress and this is one of the reasons I’m really glad I decided to give WordPress a try. Between the website, Tumblr, and this WordPress blog, WordPress was hands down the easiest to install the widget in !

If you want to get a bit crazy with this project and really customize the heck out of the timeline and make it your own, you can check out the developers page here.

This was a really, easy, fun project, and I think it’s a great way to add a little interactivity to your blog or website. Any questions, please feel free to comment, or tweet it from the side bar. Thanks for reading and good luck !

Link

Well, I guess for my first real post I should give credit where credit is due. The blog is powered by WordPress. I decided to go with WordPress because it’s free, open source, and considered by many in the blogging community as the best. I’ve blogged on Tumblr and Blogger but this is really my first experience with WordPress. I’m really looking forward to seeing what it can do.