How To Look Up Tumblr Mentions Of A Blog

Tumblr Engineering

OAuth 2 on the Tumblr API

Ten years ago HTTPS wasn't as nearly as widespread as today. It is hard to believe that HTTPS was essentially opt-in, if available at all! Back then, people also had to get creative when inventing means to delegate access to someone else. One solution was OAuth 1, conceived by the IETF, later adopted by Tumblr in 2011.

Time went by, and here we are in 2021, with hardly any popular website not shielded with HTTPS (including your own blog!). Today, it wouldn't make much sense to adopt OAuth 1 as inconvenient as it is. Yet here we are, still asking people to use outdated protocols for their new fancy Tumblr apps. Not anymore!

Starting today, you have another option: we're officially opening up OAuth 2 support for the Tumblr API!

Get started

OAuth 2 flow requires you to know two key URIs:

For authorization requests, you should use /oauth2/authorize
To exchange authorization codes and refresh tokens, you'll need to use /v2/oauth2/token

If you're familiar with OAuth 2, register an application and check out our API documentation (specifically the section on OAuth 2) to get up and running.

The future of OAuth 1

There are no plans to shut down OAuth 1. Your app will continue to work as usual. But be sure to keep an eye on this blog just in case anything new pops up that would prevent us from serving OAuth 1 requests.

What's more, if you wish to adopt OAuth 2 in your app, given its superior simplicity, you don't have to migrate entirely to OAuth 2 at once. Instead, you can keep the old sign-up / log-in flow working, and exchange OAuth 1 access token to OAuth 2 tokens on the fly. There's only one catch: this exchange will invalidate the original access token, so you should be using only the OAuth 2 Bearer authentication for any subsequent requests.

Next steps

We'll be adding support for OAuth 2 to our API clients in the coming months. Follow this blog to learn firsthand when this happens.
Although we do support client-side OAuth 2 flow, we can't recommend using it unless absolutely required. We might harden it with PKCE someday, though.

That's all from us today. Happy hacking!

Requiring HTTPS on the Tumblr API

The time has come folks! We're officially dropping support for insecure (http://) requests to the Tumblr API after October 31st, 2021. Instead, please use https:// for all requests. The following day we'll start failing all insecure requests and invalidating any credentials sent in plain text. You can expect the API to respond with a 403 Forbidden status and a 5006 subcode in this scenario.

Yes, this means you can still get freaky for one last Halloween, but please make sure you add the s to https before you head out for your annual trick-or-treating adventure!

Tumblr Hack Week, September 2021 Edition

It was HACK WEEK at Tumblr and Automattic earlier this month! Just like back in June, we stopped our normal work to focus on some great possible new features, some bug fixing, and more. Here's a taste of some of the projects that got hacked together. Some of these will hopefully make it to be real new parts of Tumblr, but as always, we can't guarantee anything here with a timeline or even that they'll ever see the light of day again – they're hacks!

Fixing Tag URL issues across Tumblr

L and @superchlorine are working on fixing a lot of issues about how we parse tags in URLs, so that we are more consistent across the web and the apps. This is something that we know has been frustrating for a long time: trying to search for posts tagged with a + sign or with spaces often doesn't work as you'd expect. But not for much longer! We've been slowly fixing these issues one at a time and posting about it on the Changes blog.

Tumblr Ignite: pay to promote posts!

This actually carried over from a previous Hack Day: the ability to click a little 🔥 button on a post, throw down some cash, and promote that post as a Sponsored post across Tumblr. There'd be some kind of moderation queue on our side to ensure nothing unsafe gets sponsored in this way, and any sponsored post would be "frozen" and not editable during the time it's being promoted. The Ads Core team, lead by @thstall with help from Argyris, Oleg, and Nathan took this pretty far towards being production-ready.

Bringing two-factor authentication settings to the mobile apps

We really want as many people as possible to protect their accounts by leveraging Two Factor Authentication, which you can currently enable by going to your account settings on the web. But it'd be even better to be able to access these settings in the mobile apps themselves! Megs, Adam, and Eduardo are still working to make this a reality.

The Return of Reblog Graphs

For those of you who remember this experiment in Tumblr Labs, this is a popup you can check out on posts which shows you a graph of all of the reblogs on a post and how they're connected. This is one crazy way you can visualize how posts on Tumblr get reblogged around in huge chains and clusters! @cyle got a working React-based prototype working for Hack Week, and now we're working to bring this back to the web for real.

Tumblr Fan Funding

Connie and the Post+ team built a prototype of Fan Funding on Tumblr, to help creators set a funding goal and get to that goal, using a lot of the same technology we used to create Post+.

Stay tuned to the @changes blog to find out if any of these end up becoming a part of Tumblr for real!

One distinguishing feature of Automattic's work culture is a team rotation, through which an individual can move from one team to another. A rotation can happen for a few reasons: to "try out" a new role and gain new skills, to backfill an understaffed team, or to cultivate cross-pollination and diversity across the company. Some rotations are several months long, while others may turn into a permanent team switch.

Tumblr, which is part of Automattic, is currently hiring data scientists and search engineers and machine learning engineers. Thanks to this system of rotations, last year we were able to fill a few of these positions, on the Tumblr Core Data Science team, internally. This team contributes to Tumblr recommendation systems, discovery feeds, targeted push notifications, user-interest profiling, and computational advertisement. Team members work on designing, developing, and maintaining large-scale machine learning algorithms, data pipelines, and backend services to connect users with the content they love. Our data infrastructure is built on top of open source big data frameworks such as Apache Spark and Scalding, orchestrated by Apache Airflow and with a PHP backend layer.

In this post, Adam and Vicki, two Automatticians who experienced a rotation onto the team, tell us about their work in data, their rotations, and being part of Automattic.

Very cool stuff! 👏 Give it a read.

Want to embed a tweet? Just paste the URL into a new link block on Tumblr. Or you can use the Share feature in other apps, like Twitter itself, to send the tweet URL to the Tumblr app.

You'll get a perfect little screenshot of the tweet. You don't have to flap your device around to help the image develop, but nobody is going to stop you.

A great piece from Vicki, an Automattic engineer on rotation at Tumblr, about the ritual of deploying code to production! 🚢

Tumblr Hack Day, June 2021 Edition

It was Hack Day again at Tumblr! A couple of times per year we grind everything to a halt and spend 24 hours working on whatever we want and see how far we can get with our hacks. Here are some of the projects that got made for Hack Day! Some of these things you may end up seeing on the site…

Timestamps on Posts

@superchlorine hacked the website to show timestamps on every post, reblog trail item, and note in the notes view. This is also already a popular XKit extension, and it's easy to see why!

Mutual Love

Evgeniy hacked the Tumblr Android app to play a cute sound and animation whenever you follow someone who already follows you! Being mutuals on Tumblr is something special, and this celebrates it in such a cute way.

(This example uses this lovely kiss animation.)

Grid and Masonry View for the Dashboard

@cyle hacked the dashboard on web to view it in a grid format (like the Likes page on web) or a masonry format (like the Explore and Tagged pages on web). It creates a dense amount of information!

Post only to a Tagged Page

Tanya hacked the post editor to let you post directly to a tagged page! The posts made this way will only show up on that tagged page, and not your blog, or anywhere else. Great for folks that want to participate in a tag but not have it show up on their blog!

Mobile Rave Room

And it wouldn't be a Tumblr Hack Day without a rave room hack: @oli took the rave room mobile and did a (completely not officially sponsored) DJ set in NYC and live streamed it.

Stay tuned to the @changes blog to see if any of these hacks make it on Tumblr for real!

A better inclusive and accessible design

Apple has always focused on providing a great experience, from the presentations to what it proposes for the developers. On the second day of the WWDC21 event, a theme that keeps coming back is the importance of a more inclusive and accessible design on all of the different application scopes.

It can even be seen in the language that we use and look for reference, respecting different perspectives, adopting more accessibility features, making our design more inclusive, especially in the area of content that includes writing, images, audio, video, it can be seen everywhere... everything we use to "talk" to our audience. 🗣🗣🗣

Despite being a topic of great importance, my main concern is that it makes us wonder if our products are in fact meeting these expectations as much as possible. ❤️

Below you can see the two sessions that talk more about it.

Bringing more accessibility features ✅

Dynamic type is not new. It's something that has been around since iOS 7, but its adoption by apps has been somewhat slow. Since iOS 11, Apple has been making significant improvements to the feature that should lead to wide-scale adoption.

Getting a little more technical... ⚙️🛠
Dynamic type supports up to seven size settings, but that's not the limit, for example, the body text style is 17pt in the default setting, but can range from 14pt to 23pt, and we can, in extreme cases count with the accessibility setting that supports even larger fonts up to 53pt for body text.

My mother ❤️is a great example of someone that is heavily dependent on this particular feature. Communication and social networking apps that have a lot of content in a very small screen real estate (iPhone screen) can take advantage of this and avoid losing any content due to the lack of space.

Does Tumblr handle Dynamic Type?

Tumblr allows us to share many different types of media in a single post. That makes the content super cool and unique, however, posts that have a lot of "regular" sized text, despite having good contrast (✨bonus points for Tumblr here!✨) still, readability can be compromised when compared to a wider range of users.

To make our vision even more inclusive when developing our apps, it's necessary to start by making the design process more inclusive as well. I'm sure this will affect the design and implementation of a good application. 📱

By: @victoriafaria

Tumblr for a new user on iOS

I have been using Tumblr for the past week, before that, I have never really jumped into it.

My first impression of the platform was that it was a more user choice-focused platform, kinda like Reddit. I got this impression from the Markdown and HTML editors that you can use to customize your blog and write posts. I was really impressed that a modern social media company still allowed the choice to edit custom HTML for blogs and a rich content editor for posts. However, this was all in the web interface…

When I opened the iPad app, I quickly realized that the app is nowhere near optimized for the iPad or any of Apple's newer technologies. In this post, I will be going over how I think Tumblr can take some of the new technologies Apple has released so far in WWDC and make their platform one of the most advanced social media on iOS.

What I think Tumblr could improve upon

The iPad UI

Other posts have touched a lot more on Tumblr's iPad UI so I will not go as in-depth as them. However I do have to say, it really needs improvement. Having one central post-column looks comical on an iPad and really ruins the look and feel of Tumblr. I think adapting to Apple's new multi-column layouts for iPad would be an amazing choice for Tumblr.

Supporting new technologies like multi-column layouts would put Tumblr ahead of the competition. A lot of social media currently do not support iPad's as well as they could. They just show a scaled-up version of their mobile interface. This leads to a lot of annoyances about the iPad app. With a lot of people moving to iPad's as the main device, having an unoptimized iPad app will send people away from using Tumblr as their blogging platform.

Multitasking

Apple so far has talked a lot about the new iPad multitasking features. Now there isn't really much at all that has been added, it is just way more discoverable than before. With more discoverability comes more users looking to use it in their favorite apps.

When I tried to use Tumblr in a multitasking manner, it just fails to work. There is no way to have multiple windows of the app, and when it is in split-screen the UI fails to adapt well. I believe adding support for iPad's new multitasking features will allow Tumblr to fly ahead of other social media at a user experience level. On Apple devices, Everything Just Works. And for the Tumblr app and multitasking, it doesn't. New and returning users will look to use multitasking and then learn that it is not supported, leaving them a little disappointed. I think supporting features like these are essential for Tumblr to thrive in the growing social media space.

Shortcuts Support

A lot of my time is spent using and creating Shortcuts. I really wish that Tumblr had a lot more support for Shortcuts. Currently, Tumblr has one action, and you need to login into that action inside the Shortcuts app. Even if you are logged into the Tumblr app on your device. I think that improved support for Shortcuts will be necessary for the future for any app on an Apple Platform. Doing simple things: like opening a specific blog, or going to your favorite creator's page, should all be doable through Shortcuts actions. Apple has been putting a lot of time and development into Shortcuts, and I really believe that Tumblr should integrate as well as it can into the Shortcut ecosystem.

In Total

I believe that Tumblr should look into supporting more of iOS's power-user features. These features will bring more people to the platform. It also makes Tumblr a good model candidate for an iOS social media app.

Discover and be able to enter the faces

You've probably already skipped those introductory screens that explain how the application works, a.k.a onboardings, or you've given up putting your information on a very long form. I know! I was also on that boat once! 👀👀

Although there are several super cool new technologies and features, it's also necessary that we know how to apply them in a correct way, ensuring a more fluid and pleasing experience within the application. The same applies to releasing a new feature, for example, how can people learn what your app is able to do?

On the third day of the WWDC21 event, the "Discoverable design" session was able to deliver to us several insights on how to create a more interactive app and memorable experiences starting with the onboarding and coming all the way to the app itself. I will comment on two of the ones that I liked the most ❤️

Keep reading

Are you watching Apple's WWDC?

The Worldwide Developers Conference kicked off this week, and we are following along to see the latest iOS improvements and dreaming up how to build a better Tumblr.

Meet Victoria, Praveen, Zach, and Ethan, a group of emerging developers writing about iOS and the future of Tumblr.

➡️ Follow along all week on @codrs

How Post Content is Stored on Tumblr

We're currently rolling out an opt-in beta for a new post editor on web which will leverage the Neue Post Format behind the scenes. It's been a very long time coming – work on the Neue Post Format began in 2015 and was originally codenamed "Poster Child", and it was borne out of a lot of things we learned dealing with the previous new post editor we released on web around that time. Over the years, the landscape of how people make posts on different platforms across the internet has changed dramatically. But here on Tumblr, we still want to stay true to our blogging roots, while giving access to a wide creative canvas, and the Neue Post Format reflects that work.

With literally billions (tens of billions!) of posts on Tumblr, how do we move this churning engine of content from one format to another without breaking everything? It took many phases, and releasing the new editor on the web will be one of the final pieces in place. To understand how far we've come and the challenges we've had to face, you need to know the deep dark secrets of how we store post content on Tumblr. This hellsite we all love is held together by duct tape, good intentions, and luck, and we're constantly working to make it better!

A post is seemingly a very simple data model: it has an author, it has content, and it was posted at a certain time. Every post has a unique identifier once it's created. In the case of reblogs, they also have the "parent" post and blog it was reblogged from (more on How Reblogs Work over here). In a standard normalized database table, these columns would look like:

Post identifier (a very big integer)
Author blog identifier (an integer pointing to the "blogs" database table)
Parent post identifier (if it's a reblog)
Parent blog identifier (if it's a reblog)
When it was posted (a timestamp of some kind)
Post content (more on this in a minute)

Before the Neue Post Format, posts had discrete "types", so that'd be a column here as well. But once you have these discrete "types", you have to determine how you want to store the content of each "type". For photo posts, this is a set of one or more images. For video posts, this is either a reference to an uploaded video file, or it's a URL to an external video. For text posts, it's just text, in HTML format. So the actual value of that "post content" column can change depending on what type it is.

Here's a simple example, note how each post type has different kinds of content:

As Tumblr grew, its capabilities grew. We added the ability to add a caption to photo, video, and audio posts. We added the ability to add a "source" to quote posts. We needed somewhere to store that new post content. Because Tumblr was growing so rapidly at the time, this needed to happen fast, so we took the easiest path available: add a new column! That first "post content" column was renamed "one", and the new post content column was named "two". And as Tumblr grew more, eventually we added "three". And each column's value could be different based on the post type.

Needless to say, eventually this made it very difficult to have consistent and easy to understand patterns for how we figure out things like… how many images are in a post? Since we added the ability to add an image in the caption, it's possible there's images in the "one", "two", or "three" columns, but each may be in a different format based on the post type. Reblogs further complicate the storage design, as a reblog copies and reformats post content from its parent post to the new post. The code to figure out how to render a post became extremely complicated and hard to change as we wanted to add more to it.

Further complicating this was the fact that most (but not all) of these post content fields leveraged either HTML or PHP's built-in serialization logic as the literal data format. Before PHP 7, HTML parsing in PHP (which is what Tumblr uses behind the scenes) was extremely slow, so rendering a post became more of a struggle as the post's reblog trail grew or its post content complexity increased. And HTML and PHP's serialization logic isn't easily portable to other languages, like Go, Scala, Objective-C, Swift, or Java, which we use in other backend services and our mobile apps.

With all this in mind, in 2015, two needs converged: the need to have a more easily understandable and portable data format shared from the database all the way up to the apps, and the need for more types of post content, decoupled from post type. The Neue Post Format was born: a JSON-based data schema for content blocks and their layout. This has afforded us the flexibility to make new types of content available faster, without needing to worry necessarily about how we'll store it in HTML format, and has made the post content format portable from the database up to the Android app, iOS app, and the new React-based web client.

Going back to the standard, normalized database table schema for posts, we've now achieved the intended simplicity with a flexible JSON structure inside that "post content" column. We no longer need post types at all when storing a post. A post can have any and all of the content types within it, instead of being siloed separately with a myriad of confusing options depending on the post type. Now a post can be a video and photo post at the same time! When the new editor on the web is fully released, we can finally say that this format is the fuel powering the engine of content on Tumblr. It'll enable us to more quickly build out block types and layouts we couldn't before, such as polls, blog card blocks, and overlapping images/videos/text. Sky's the limit.

- @cyle

Open Sourcing Kanvas: Tumblr's Media Editor and Camera

Today, Tumblr is releasing Kanvas, the Media Editor and Camera used in the Tumblr iOS app, as open-source!

https://github.com/tumblr/kanvas-ios

Kanvas is an open-source iOS library for adding effects, drawings, text, stickers, and making GIFs from existing media or the camera. It's used by Tumblr for its camera, media editor, GIF maker, and media posting tool, and WordPress will be using it in the future too!

The project is licensed under the Mozilla Public License v2. Check out the Projects tab on GitHub for an idea of what we're working on, and how you can contribute. The README is a good place to see Kanvas in action and add it to your own app. And if you're interested, follow the project, as we'll be posting more documentation about how Kanvas work and the history of the project.

Thanks to everyone who's contributed to Kanvas over the years, and we're excited to see what this new open-source & WordPress chapter brings.

Friday, October 23rd, 2020

🌟 New

Users on web can now filter their activity by preset types in the activity popover in the header.
Users on web can now filter their activity by any type(s) on the activity page for their blog.
Users on web can now un-group similar notifications on the activity page for their blog.
Users on web now see tags used in reblogs on the activity page for their blog.
The followers and following pages on web are now powered by the new web experience.
We've updated the Tumblr Jobs page to include more opportunities!

🛠 Fixes

Fixed an issue where blocked blogs could appear in the "Try these posts" recommendations.
Fixed an issue that caused group chat messages to stop being received in real time.

The web frontend updates we mentioned in our post about refactoring the Tumblr Activity backend have shipped! Enjoy!