staff:

We’ve just made a few changes to make your tumblelogs a bit more accessible and search-engine friendly. One thing you’ll probably notice right away: Permalink URLs now include a summary of the post content.

http://www.davidslog.com/post/34145219/dont-laugh-at-us

This makes the URLs a little more attractive, and can help search engines identify your posts.

(Huge thanks to the guys at Disqus for preserving comments from the old structure!)

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. We’ve switched our preset themes to use this tag, and we suggest including it in your custom themes to help search engines index your posts.  See the theme docs for reference.

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.

staff:

New: High-Res Photos

High-resolution copies of your photos are now available for your tumblelog!  You can enable them from the Advanced menu on your Customize screen, and photos that don’t have a click-through link set will automatically link to the high-res version.

These complementary theme variables have also been added:

{Photo-HighRes}

{block:HighRes} {/block:HighRes}

Please note: We’ve only been storing high-res copies of photos uploaded since mid-October, 2008.

staff:

To take advantage of Tag Channels and other tagging features in emailed posts, we’re now parsing for hashtag-style syntax in email messages.

Simply prefix a tag word with a pound-sign (“#”) in your message, and it will be removed from the text and set as a tag for the post.

Example email:

I love the new MacBook Pro! #Apple #tech

This would be posted as:

I love the new MacBook Pro!

…with tags “Apple” and “tech”.

staff:

We just updated the Followers and Following pages. Let me know what you think!

staff:

Jacob:

We have buttons! Everyone loves buttons! Come to Reblog This Concert on Monday (August 10th) and pick some up.

staff:

We’re rolling out a big new development today:

Introducing Tag Channels.

Similar to Flickr’s tag pages or Twitter’s hashtags, Tumblr’s Tag Channels aggregate tagged posts from everyone on Tumblr in real time with a few special twists:

• To deal with the overwhelming volume of content that makes most real-time search incredibly unwieldy, we’ve developed a clustering engine that lets you quickly filter the 650,000 new Tumblr posts created every day, based on likes and reblogs.  You can see a few of the best posts or more unfiltered posts.
• Our post-filtering is automatically calibrating to apply more or less filtering (by default) based on the level of activity in a channel.
• Built-in throttling (still being tweaked) prevents monopolization by individual blogs.
• Tags are normalized, so “Barack Obama” = “barackobama”.
• We’ve made it super-easy to track tags on your Dashboard.

We’re still right in the middle of development.  A few things might be acting funny, and we’re not done with the central tag directory yet.  So please bear with us!

Now start tagging your posts. :)

For your inspiration: Tech, Politics, NYC, District 9, Healthcare, NFL, FAIL, Pizza, Baby Animals.

staff:

Hey guys. I’m sick. I don’t mean “crazy, cool, insane.” I mean I’m ailing. Some of the people at work suggested I ride the subway more often to help build up my immune system, so if you see a cranky dude in a bathrobe and bunny slippers on the 6 train eating chicken soup today, that’d be me. But no matter. The important thing is that we’ll be here for Tumblr Tuesday, every Tuesday until the end of time, no matter what.

Ready? Ready!

Jay Parkinson, MD
Jay Parkinson is the doctor of the future. This MD from Williamsburg, Brooklyn completed residencies in Pediatrics and Preventive Medicine, got a Masters in Public Health, and was named one of the top 10 most creative people in healthcare by Fast Company. Now, Doctor Jay spends his days running the startup he co-founded which aims to connect patients with doctors. And, of course, he writes about all this and more on his Tumblr blog.

Fancy Fast Food
The ingredients: Food ordered from popular fast food restaurants, and nothing else. The recipes: Meticulously documented with photos and video. The end result: Fancy Fast Food. It might still be bad for you, but it looks so good. An extreme food makeover from FFF can turn some Taco Bell into Tacobellini, some McDonald’s into McSteak & Potatoes, and some Burger King into a BK Quiche.

MakingOf Tumblelog
The good people at MakingOf.com bring their fresh look at the process of moviemaking to Tumblr. Co-founded by Natalie Portman, MakingOf champions the art of entertainment creation with news, interviews, and tons of behind-the-scenes content. Also: They’re looking for an intern to help with their Tumblr blog.

Music for Your Coffee
Grab a cup of coffee and press play. Period. Actually, I think this will work with other beverages as well. Let’s try tea. Check. Orange juice? Yes. Smoothy? Yup. Pumpkin Spice Latte… Pumpkin Spice Latte… Weird, nothing’s happening.

Electric Power
Electric vehicles and clean energy are covered with verve over here. A casual perusal will show you some of the hottest cars you’ve ever seen that just happen to run on electricity, while a more in-depth reading will give you tons of info on every facet of the technology of energy efficiency.

Your turn! What are some other Tumblr blogs that people should follow?

staff:

Whoa! I don’t know much about sports but I know that the Knicks on Tumblr is a total homerun!

staff:

Hey guys. I’m sick. I don’t mean “crazy, cool, insane.” I mean I’m ailing. Some of the people at work suggested I ride the subway more often to help build up my immune system, so if you see a cranky dude in a bathrobe and bunny slippers on the 6 train eating chicken soup today, that’d be me. But no matter. The important thing is that we’ll be here for Tumblr Tuesday, every Tuesday until the end of time, no matter what.

Ready? Ready!

Jay Parkinson, MD
Jay Parkinson is the doctor of the future. This MD from Williamsburg, Brooklyn completed residencies in Pediatrics and Preventive Medicine, got a Masters in Public Health, and was named one of the top 10 most creative people in healthcare by Fast Company. Now, Doctor Jay spends his days running the startup he co-founded which aims to connect patients with doctors. And, of course, he writes about all this and more on his Tumblr blog.

Fancy Fast Food
The ingredients: Food ordered from popular fast food restaurants, and nothing else. The recipes: Meticulously documented with photos and video. The end result: Fancy Fast Food. It might still be bad for you, but it looks so good. An extreme food makeover from FFF can turn some Taco Bell into Tacobellini, some McDonald’s into McSteak & Potatoes, and some Burger King into a BK Quiche.

MakingOf Tumblelog
The good people at MakingOf.com bring their fresh look at the process of moviemaking to Tumblr. Co-founded by Natalie Portman, MakingOf champions the art of entertainment creation with news, interviews, and tons of behind-the-scenes content. Also: They’re looking for an intern to help with their Tumblr blog.

Music for Your Coffee
Grab a cup of coffee and press play. Period. Actually, I think this will work with other beverages as well. Let’s try tea. Check. Orange juice? Yes. Smoothy? Yup. Pumpkin Spice Latte… Pumpkin Spice Latte… Weird, nothing’s happening.

Electric Power
Electric vehicles and clean energy are covered with verve over here. A casual perusal will show you some of the hottest cars you’ve ever seen that just happen to run on electricity, while a more in-depth reading will give you tons of info on every facet of the technology of energy efficiency.

Your turn! What are some other Tumblr blogs that people should follow?