Tag: tumblr

Tumblr ou le proto-blog [fr]

[en] A brief introduction to Tumblr, which is a really great blogging tool. It caters to a completely different need than WordPress, in my opinion: share stuff you've found online, easily. Collect photos, videos, quotes and links in one place, with some nice social features that allow you to re-share stuff others have found -- and them, your stuff.

Je veux vous parler de Tumblr, parce c’est génial. Si WordPress c’est un peu la Rolls des services de blog, Tumblr en est le degré zéro. Pas dans le sens que c’est nul, non, mais dans le sens que c’est basique et pas prise de tête. C’est le retour au blog “bloc-notes”, après le développement du “blog-magazine”. (Hop, filez voir mon Tumblr à moi.)

Tumblr est prévu surtout pour rassembler en un endroit des choses vues ailleurs. Des photos, des citations, des vidéos, des liens& On peut y mettre son propre contenu, bien entendu — même des textes.

C’est le blog sans histoires, sans prétention, et sans fioritures. Tumblr intègre une dimension communautaire, donc c’est aussi le blog “ooh, vous avez vu ce truc cool que j’ai trouvé? et le poème sympa qu’a écrit Juliette?”

Je vous explique :-)

  • c’est gratuit, donc filez direct ouvrir un compte, qu’on puisse continuer
  • filez sur la page “goodies“, et faites glisser le bookmarklet dans votre barre de liens favoris
  • quand vous êtes sur une page intéressante, cliquez sur le bookmarklet — un clic de confirmation, et hop, c’est dans votre Tumblr!

Bookmarklet?

Quand vous êtes sur quelque chose d’intéressant que vous avez envie de mettre dans votre Tumblr, cliquez sur le bookmarklet. Le bookmarklet fait apparaître une petite fenêtre pop-up et il essaie de deviner quel genre de contenu vous désirez publier:

Share on Tumblr

Si vous êtes simplement sur une page web, Tumblr va partir du principe que vous voulez partager un lien sur votre blog. Si vous avez sélectionné du texte, il va vous proposer de publier une citation. J’avoue que j’utilise énormément cette fonctionnalité:

Ajouter une citation à son Tumblr

Si Tumblr devine mal, vous pouvez simplement changer le type de publication. Il va sans dire que vous pouvez faire des modifications au contenu avant de le publier. Et si vous avez envie d’écrire une petite bafouille, utilisez le mode “texte”!

Communauté?

Tumblr, comme toute bonne plateforme de blogs qui se respecte, est un réseau social (à la facebook, si vous voulez, puisque c’est le plus connu ces temps). Vous voyez un blog Tumblr qui vous plaît? Cliquez sur “follow” en haut à gauche (ça rappelle Twitter, non? lire mon article pour plus d’infos). Allez, ajoutez mon Tumblr et celui de Michelle, au hasard, pour commencer.

Comme votre page d’accueil Twitter ou Facebook, celle de Tumblr vous montre une liste des dernières publications des personnes que vous suivez. Vous aimez quelque chose? cliquez sur le petit coeur en haut à droite de l’article. Vous voulez republier quelque chose dans votre blog? cliquez sur “reblog”:

Tumblr tableau de bord

Il va sans dire que Tumblr ajoute automatiquement un lien vers la source originale, tant lorsque l’on reblogue quelque chose de Tumblr que lorsque l’on ajoute un lien, un citation, une photo ou une vidéo.

Règles avancées?

Pour ceux qui aiment bricoler, on peut:

  • choisir le layout de son Tumblr, voire créer le sien
  • permettre à ses lecteurs de laisser des commentaires
  • utiliser votre propre nom de domaine (je planche sur la question pour mon propre tumblelog)

Moralité?

Tumblr est idéal pour un blog dans l’esprit “collection de choses un peu en vrac que j’ai glanées ici et ailleurs”. C’est très facile à utiliser. Ça va à l’essentiel. C’est sans prétention, ce n’est pas intimidant.

Laissez l’adresse de votre Tumblr dans les commentaires (qu’ils soit nouveau-né ou déjà bien rôdé), et je vous suivrai!

Tumblr to Capture Comments? [en]

[fr] J'aimerais un système permettant de publier directement sur mon Tumblr les commentaires que je laisse sur d'autres blogs, sans passer par coComment.

The other evening, I was explaining that I still used coComment to capture the comments I made on other blogs. As always, people try to suggest alternatives: co.mments or disqus, for example. I appreciate the suggestions, but they show me that I haven’t managed to make myself clear.

CoComment does two main things:

  • track conversations you participate in (or want to keep an eye on) so that you are alerted when a new comment is added to the thread
  • capture the comments you make on other blogs so that you can collect them somewhere or republish them.

I use mainly the second feature. I’m not that interested in tracking all the conversations I take part in. Every now and again I am, and co.mments does indeed do the job, in an ad hoc way. Disqus is quite exciting and also allows centralization of the comments I make with the system (if I got it right), but it has the great disadvantage of still being too “blogger-centric” instead of “commenter-centric”: sure, I can install disqus on my blog (as a blogger), but it isn’t going to help me capture or track all my comments until all the blogs I visit have done the same.

So, like at the end of a messy break-up where you’re still sleeping with your ex, I’m still using coComment for the following:

  • capture the comments I make all over the place and republish them in my Tumblr.

That’s it. One thing coComment does pretty well, despite all the criticism I can make to the service, is capture comments I leave in a variety of comment forms (from WordPress to FriendFeed and Typepad and Blogger and even home-made in some cases) and spit them out in an RSS feed.

Yesterday, an idea dawned on me: what I really want is for my comments to be published in my Tumblr. Maybe we can come up with a way to do that directly?

I use Tumblr loads, and love it. The main thing I actively use it for (I’ve embedded a few RSS feeds in it) is for quoting interesting passages off blog/articles that I read. It’s very easy:

3 Steps to Share a Quote on Tumblr

  1. highlight some text on a page
  2. click on the Tumblr bookmarklet
  3. Tumblr automagically recognizes it as a quote, and pops up a window which you use to publish it.

The result of all this is that I have a Tumblr which is full of quotes, comments (thankfully coComment seem to have removed the nasty ads from the RSS feed I complained about), and other things (videos and screenshots, for example).

I’ve been thinking a lot (but not writing, I know) about how these new tools in my landscape, which weren’t there 8 years ago (in a few days!) when I started blogging, are modifying my publishing and interaction habits. The panel I moderated at BlogTalk in Cork was about that, actually, but I think we only brushed the surface.

So, back to the point for this post: I’d like a hack for my Tumblr bookmarklet — or maybe a separate bookmarklet (by Tumblr or a third party) which will publish the comment I’m submitting to my tumblelog. It would work a bit like the coComment bookmarklet: click it to activate it at some point before hitting submit — and it does its magic when you submit the comment.

If you like the idea, head over the Get Satisfaction and add your 2 cents.

Please Don't Be Rude, coComment. I Loved You. [en]

[fr] J'étais une inconditionnelle de la première heure de coComment. Je les ai même eus comme clients. Aujourd'hui j'ai le coeur lourd, car après le désastre de la version 2.0 "beta", le redesign du site qui le laisse plus confus qu'avant, les fils RSS qui timent out, le blog sans âme et les pubs qui clignotent, je me retrouve avec de grosses bannières autopromotionnelles dans mon tumblelog, dans lequel j'ai intégré le flux RSS de mes commentaires.

Just a little earlier this evening, my heart sank. It sank because of this:

Steph's Tumblr - rude cocomment

That is a screenshot of my Tumblr. And what coComment is doing here — basically, inserting a huge self-promotional banner in their RSS feed — is really rude.

I’m really sad, because I used to love coComment. I was involved (not much, but still) early on and was a first-hour fan. They were even my client for over six months, during which I acted as a community manager, gave feedback on features to the team, and wrote a whole bunch of blog posts. This ended, sadly, when coComment finally incorporated, because we couldn’t reach an agreement as to the terms of my engagement.

Inserting content in the RSS feeds is only the latest in a series of disappointments I’ve had with the service. I used to have a sidebar widget to show the last comments I’d made all over the place on my blog, but I removed it at some point — I can’t remember when — because it had stopped working. I tried adding it again, but for some reason WordPress can’t find the feed. It seemed very slow when I tried to access it directly, so maybe it’s timing out — and I think I recall that is what made me remove it in the first place.

I’m sad also to see blinking ads on the coComment site, confusing navigation, pages with click here links, and a blog which has no soul, filled with post after post of press-release-like “we won this contest”, “we’re sponsoring this event”, “version xyz released”, “we were here too” — all too often on behalf of a mostly faceless “coComment Team”. CoComment used to have something going, but to me it now seems like an exciting promise that lost its way somewhere along the line.

Last August, the version 2.0 beta disaster made me cringe with embarrassment for my former love (who on earth takes all their users back to beta when 1.0 was stable?) and left many blogs paralyzed, including my own. I started writing a blog post, at the time, which I never published, as other things got in the way. Here’s what I’d written:

I reinstalled the extension yesterday (I’d removed it a few months ago because I suspected it might be involved in a lot of browser hang-ups) but had to uninstall it a couple of hours later:

  • too many non-comment textareas get the coco-bar
  • blacklisting seems broken
  • pop-up requesting info confirmation for website blocking form submission of non-comment forms, even though coco-bar was removed AND extension was deactivated for the page.

It would be nice to be able to read some clear and detailed information about these issues and their resolution on the blog, so that I know when it’s worth trying the extension again.

Also, a major issue is that when the coComment server isn’t responding, people cannot leave comments on integrated/enhanced blogs (like this one, or my personal blog). I had to remove coComment integration from my blog so that coComment downtime doesn’t prevent my readers from leaving comments.

Update: in case this wasn’t clear first time around, these problems have since then been solved and coComment apologized for the mess. It doesn’t erase the pain, though.

So, coComment — and Matt — are you listening?

You’re in the process of alienating somebody who was one of your most passionate users — if you haven’t lost me already. I cared. I forgave. I waited. I hoped. But right now, I don’t have the impression you care much about me. I’ve seen excuses, I’ve even seen justifications, and now I see large ugly banners in my Tumblr. What happened to you?

You’ll have understood, I hope, that this is not just about me. This is about the people who use your service. The service you provide is for us, right?

Finally Getting Tumblr [en]

[fr] Un tumblelog, c'est un blog réduit à sa plus simple expression: des articles, des liens permanents, un fil RSS. Pas de commentaires, pas de gadgets, pas de tags, pas de catégories. Un bookmarklet permet de facilement choisir entre six sortes de billets prédéfinis (texte, citation, lien, photo, chat, vidéo) et devine même pour vous si vous le cliquez depuis une page web.

C'est un lieu idéal pour bloguer en passant, au fil des lectures. Noter une idée en vitesse. Mettre en valeur une photo ou une vidéo qu'on a appréciée. Prendre des notes sous forme de citation lorsque l'on lit.

I’ve had a tumblelog since February of this year, but it’s taken me a long time to figure out where it fit into my online presence.

I first tried importing everything into it, but that was a mess. Jaiku is better when it comes to lifestreaming, for the moment. (Wow, just checked, and Suprglu’s still alive — head there if you want the “fuller” version of my lifestream… with the lag, though.)

Anyway. This is what I publish on it nowadays: comments from other blogs, screenshots, quotes, and passing thoughts.

Let’s take a closer look.

What on Earth is This Tumblelog Thing?

A tumblelog is a blog stripped of all the non-essential stuff: no categories, no comments, no monthly archives, no fancy layouts, widgets. What is left? Posts, permalinks, RSS feeds… and a simple, no-nonsense layout.

Tumblr

Back in 2000 when I started blogging, the revolutionary thing about blogging tools (which at the time meant Blogger, there weren’t that many others) was that they made it dead easy to publish things online.

Tumblr has focused on that. Make it simple. Remove everything that gets in the way. Make the act of blogging so effortless that it can really become a true backup brain.

It’s a place for passing thoughts, interesting links, a video here or there. No time lost for anything else than the act of posting. Whatever you do, don’t think before posting.

A tumblelog is really a “me first!” thing. Stuff for me, first. Maybe you’ll find it interesting too — but if you don’t, no heat.

What I’m Importing

Tumblr Feed Settings

At the beginning, as I said, I imported everything into my Tumblr. But then, I wanted to import my Tumblr into my lifestream on Jaiku, and I ended up with duplicate content.

I decided to remove all my imports from Tumblr except for comments — through coComment. Comments on other people’s blogs are an important part of my online activity, and they deserve to be “kept” somewhere. CoComment does that, of course, but not in a really comfortable way for readers (the RSS feed is fine, and included on my blog, but it’s only the last comments). Reminds me that I never wrote that post about the disastrous launch of the 2.0 version, btw. Oh, well.

So, my comments go in my Tumblr.

During my stay in San Francisco this summer, I was converted (quite easily) to Skitch by Mr. Messina, and since then, my flickr photostream has seen the arrival of a great many screenshots. I feel like I finally have a camera to take photographs of my online life — as soon as I see something of note or bump into a problem, Skitch allows me [http://flickr.com/photos/bunny/tags/skitch](effortlessly upload a screenshot).

These screenshots are a narrative of my online wanderings, and as such, deserve to be displayed in a timeline separate from my thousands of photographs.

In the Tumblr they go.

What I’m Posting

So far, I’ve found two really important uses to Tumblr: quotes and thoughts. The Tumblr bookmarklet is smart enough that it recognizes that I want to post a quote if I select some text on the page before clicking it:

Posting a Quote to Tumblr

This makes posting quotes dead easy. It’s suddenly made my online reading way more valuable: I’ve always read books taking notes on what I was reading, copying quotes so I had them handy in the future — and when a lot of my reading shifted online, I lost that. With Tumblr, I’ve found it again. (Finding the quotes will be trickier, I hope Google’s indexing of the Tumblr will be sufficient.)

The Tumblr Dashboard has six pre-set types of posts: text, photo, quote, link, chat, video.

Tumblr Dashboard

These pre-set post types offer different formatting and posting forms.

I’ve started to use the text post type to jot down random thoughts that occur to me, or notes to myself. For example, I’ve spent quite a bit of today thinking about a talk I’m going to give tomorrow, and jotted down some thoughts like this one.

As you can see, Tumblr allows me to link to an individual post.

A few times, I’ve also posted snippets of chat/IM conversations.

My Heritage Celebrity Collage and Tumblr [en]

[fr] My Heritage Celebrity Collage prend une de vos photos et cherche à quelles célébrités vous ressemblez. Tumblr est un endroit où bloguer, mais style "degré zéro du blog".

While I was waiting for Dreamhost to give me back CTTS so that I could finally post On the Road to Being a Healthier Geek, both Facebook and Google Reader offered me new toys to try out. I guess I’m a joiner too — I spend my time signing up for things.

My Heritage Celebrity Collage

This one is Francesca’s fault. It’s a photo recognition thing that will analyse a photo of you and match it to celebrity photos.

What I liked

  • sign-up without a glitch
  • allows me to upload a photo by URL (yesss!)
  • allows direct posting to FaceBook
  • saves my collages silently

What I liked less

  • finding guys in my celebrity lookalikes (yeah, I know)
  • default “spam all your friends with this” when posting to FaceBook
  • ugly album URLs

About the quality of recognition itself: it seems that things like hairstyle, face inclination, etc. have quite a lot of impact on who you’ll be matched to. I tried three different photos, and got three different sets of faces. (I’ve been told at times I bear some resemblence to Reese Witherspoon, Tilda Swindon, Nicole Kidman, or Sandrine Kiberlain — but never any of the names I saw in the collages. The names are gone now, but I’ll let you judge.)

Tumblr

OMG, the fragmentation of the online self! The disappearance of the letter “e” in the web2.0 world! What shall we do?

Seriously, Tumblr has some interestingness to it. It aims at what I call “zero-level blogging” (le degré zéro du blog) — something I know I tend to use Twitter for at times. I’ve been using Facebook for that too, and my Cheese Sandwich Weblog.

What I liked

  • easy sign-up (that’s always good)
  • I can make it pink
  • bookmarklet (like Facebook) to share stuff on my Tumblelog

What I liked less

If this continues, I won’t just be blogging about the need for integration of my online presence, I’ll be screaming. Be warned.