Matthew Buchanan (Home)

If you’ve visited David Karp’s Tumblr page recently you’ll see he’s privy to two new features that I’m guessing will be made available to the rest of us in due course.

Firstly, as alluded to in May, David’s (and Marco’s) URLs have dropped the post/ portion and now contain just the domain name, post ID and optional summary text or “slug”. To remain backwards compatible the URLs still support the addition of the missing portion: the longer URL redirects to the newer, shorter version.

Personally I’d prefer to retain the post/ portion, as it’s more descriptive of what content the user may expect to find on the page. In fact, I can see a benefit in being more explicit, by replacing the generic post with an indication of the type of content, for example an audio post could look like this:

http://matthewbuchanan.name/audio/39428724/galvanize-the-empire

Going one step further — and this may be beyond the capabilities of Tumblr’s current architecture — why not drop the post ID from the URL altogether? Post IDs uniquely identify a post from all those made on Tumblr, but now that the service supports post summaries in its URLs, the summary text in combination with a user’s Tumblr name (or custom URL) could be used to identify any post. (The summary text portion of each post’s URL would, of course, have to be unique to its owner, but that’s a simple test to administer, and if necessary correct, when a post is created or edited. It would also only be possible if descriptive URLs were enabled in the user’s Advanced settings.)

New notes

Getting back to new features, the potentially more useful development is support for “notes”, which are for the moment only visible in the Dashboard view. On David’s page, each post indicates how many notes it has, and clicking through to the permalink page for a post displays the notes in full (eg. “david reblogged this from soxiam”).

As a social network, Tumblr is in part built around the notion of reposting others’ content, and “reblog” notes are often a good way of discovering new tumblelogs to follow. I’ll certainly be adding this feature to my own template if and when it’s released.