Tumblr Hack Day, September 2024 Edition

Once again it was Hack Day at Tumblr! You've probably seen one of these posts before. A couple of times per year we slow down our normal work and spend a day working on scratching a personal itch or features we want as user and see how far we can get with our hacks. One thing from the last Hack Week in January made it out: new default blog avatars!

Here are some of the projects that got built for our most recent Hack Day in September. Some of these things you may also end up seeing on the site… and one of them isn’t included here because it’ll likely be a fun Halloween surprise. 👻

Advanced search operators

Instead of telling you about this here, we have the extreme pleasure of telling you that this already launched! Read all about it over on the Changes blog. Instead, what we can preview here are some potential new interface elements for these advanced search options, now that we have them thanks to @lesianlen:

“Live” engagements on posts

There are many thousands of reactions, likes, and reblogs happening on Tumblr every second. Right now you can only really “see” these happen if you are frantically refreshing your feed (which, we know, some of you do). Wouldn’t it be neat if the note count, reactions, etc, all update automatically as you scroll your favorite feed (or many feeds at once with Patio)? Check it out this hack from @leogcrespo:

Communities activity tracker

Likewise, some of our beta testing Communities are extremely active, with new members, comments, and reactions flying around. Right now we don’t have a way to show those actions, as they happen, inside the community, but we know we’ll need something like this. @yi5h hacked together a sidebar widget “activity tracker” that shows recent activity happening inside a community in near-real-time:

As always, stay tuned to the @changes blog to see if any of these hacks make it on Tumblr for real! Especially the aforementioned-but-as-yet-unrevealed Halloween surprise…

Tumblr Hack Week, January 2024 Edition

Once again it was Hack Week (more than just a day!) at Tumblr! This is getting repetitive in the best way. A couple of times per year we slow down our normal work and spend a week working on scratching a personal itch or features we want as user and see how far we can get with our hacks. One thing from the last Hack Week in September made it all the way to a new experiment out to some testers: Tumblr Patio!

Here are some of the projects that got built for our most recent Hack Week in January. Some of these things you may also end up seeing on the site…

Spoiler text, spoiler blocks, and centered text!

This one is so obvious and amazing, it’s wild we don’t already have it. For Hack Week, Katie added the ability to select text in a paragraph to be hidden behind a wall of black that can be revealed with a tap. This can be super useful to hide spoilers. And even better: whole spoiler blocks. And while we’re here, the ability to center text!

A plethora of new default blog avatars

We haven’t updated our default avatars in several years. (Some of you may remember this one from 10+ years ago.) They’re feeling a bit stale to us, so why not update them? And while we’re at it… make a ton more variations! Paul from the Tumblr Design team came up with a suite of new default avatars, using our latest Tumblr color palette. Here’s a look at some of them, but there are actually many dozens more using different colors:

Notifications and emails about engagement on your posts

This one is for the folks on Tumblr who love numbers and their Activity page. Daniel, @jesseatblr​, and the Feeds & Machine Learning team worked on some new notifications and emails we could send out to people about how their posts have been doing lately on the platform, such as how many views they’ve gotten, and by how many people. We already have this available (and more) when you Blaze a post, but why not open it up to more people? It’s really useful to the folks who use Tumblr to help build an audience for their work!

A new way of navigating the web: the Command Palette

Some apps we use a lot have a “command palette” accessible via a keyboard shortcut for quick keyboard-driven access to different parts of the platform. For example, Slack and Discord have Command + K to access their quick switchers to hop around conversations. What if Tumblr had one? Kelly and Paul built one! Press Command/Control + K on Tumblr and you can use your keyboard to jump to your blog, Activity, your recent conversations, search, dozens of places!

As always, stay tuned to the @changes​ blog to see if any of these hacks make it on Tumblr for real!

Tumblr Hack Week, September 2023 Edition

Once again it was Hack Week (more than just a day!) at Tumblr! A couple of times per year we slow down our normal work and spend a week working on scratching a personal itch or features we want as user and see how far we can get with our hacks. One thing from the last Hack Day in March made it all the way to production: redesigning how direct messaging looks on Tumblr! Pretty cool!

Here are some of the projects that got made for this most recent Hack Week in September. Some of these things you may also end up seeing on the site…

Tumblr Patio

Maybe this will look familiar to you, but we love this idea of being able to organize Tumblr feeds into many “columns” side-by-side, creating a very dense but lively view of Tumblr. Lenny, Kelly, and Paul hacked this together, and we’re pretty excited to see where it’ll go. Each column can be a different feed on Tumblr, like For You, Following, your Activity, a specific blog, a search, Trending, even a Collection, so many possibilities!

Tumblr Booths

Meanwhile, a separate team of @autoplanes, Katie, @lex, Shaun, and Eve dug into the idea of selling digital and physical goods through blogs on Tumblr, leveraging our sibling platform WooCommerce! Blogs could put whatever they’d like for sale here, and have a dedicated space for it. We know there are so many amazing artists and artisans here who could use this to more easily sell their creations on Tumblr!

Avatar Frames/Hats

This one is a golden oldie, it keeps coming back hack day after hack day, and each time it gets even better. Santi and Maxime hacked together some example avatar “frames” and “hats” that folks on Tumblr could purchase for their blog. Maybe eventually people could create these and sell them or gift them to each other!

As always, stay tuned to the @changes blog to see if any of these hacks make it on Tumblr for real!

Tumblr Hack Day, December 2022 Edition

Ah yes, it was Hack Day once again at Tumblr. A few times per year we slow down our normal work and spend a day (or sometimes a whole week) working on whatever we want and see how far we can get with our hacks. The main star of the last Hack Week was… pretty much all of them!

Here are some of the projects that got made for our most recent Hack Day earlier this month. Some of these things you may also end up seeing on the site…

@yi5h worked on a huge suite of “rewards” that folks on Tumblr could unlock by doing various things on the platform, such as reblogging, creating content, even just logging in! Maybe you could earn badges this way to put on your blog…

@straku hacked together a new way of viewing reblog trails. We commonly get feedback that reblog trails are difficult to understand, so styling them differently to make the information clearer is fun to try out!

Meanwhile, Evgeniy built a beautifully simple “Back to Top” button for the Android app, which does exactly what it sounds like: brings you back to the top of whatever feed you’re currently viewing. No more scrolling, scrolling, scrolling — just one tap!

As always, stay tuned to the @changes blog to see if any of these hacks make it on Tumblr for real!

Tumblr Hack Week, September 2022 Edition

It was Hack Week (more than just a day!) once again at Tumblr! A couple of times per year we slow down our normal work and spend a week working on whatever we want and see how far we can get with our hacks. The main star of the last Hack Week was the “Summon crab!” button, and we loved it so much that we rolled it out not just for April Fools this year, but we made it our first gift-able widget in TumblrMart!

Here are some of the projects that got made for this most recent Hack Week in September. Some of these things you may also end up seeing on the site…

Tumbeast Digital Pet

Ben worked on adding our friendly server room Tumbeasts to Tumblr as a cute little digital pet. You can feed them and play with them, and they poop and get unhappy and need tending, of course. Who wouldn’t want one of these to take care of every day on Tumblr, forever and ever?

Tumblr Blaze on TumblrMart

@adalpari added Tumblr Blaze as a gift-able item in TumblrMart, which would allow folks to buy Blaze "credits" for other people. Perfect for those times you see an amazing post on Tumblr that definitely deserves to be spread around, and you don’t mind throwing some money at letting that person have a chance to spread it via Blaze!

User Account Switcher

@yi5h hacked together an account switcher for the web, so that folks can log in to more than one Tumblr account and easily switch back and forth between them. Super handy if you have one account for your roleplaying character, and another for your Star Trek fandom discussions. Very useful!

Tumblr Collections

On web as well, João made a version of an idea that’s floated around many times, the idea of being able to organize posts on Tumblr into "collections" that can be named and shared. I think everyone would very much enjoy having a collection called "waves" that’s just soothing GIFs of ocean waves.

As always, stay tuned to the @changes blog to see if any of these hacks make it on Tumblr for real!

Tumblr Hack Week, March 2022 Edition

It was Hack Week (more than just a day!) once again at Tumblr! A couple of times per year we grind everything to a halt and spend a week working on whatever we want and see how far we can get with our hacks. Since last time, we’ve launched the ability to have a Discord => Tumblr integration, we’re close to launching Twitch embed support, and custom logos are now possible in the mobile apps! And from a previous Hack Day, we’ve launched “Timestamps Everywhere” on web, and we’re working on rolling it out to the mobile apps very soon!

Here are some of the projects that got made for this last Hack Week. Some of these things you may also end up seeing on the site…

Interacting as a Sideblog/Secondary blog

@designpatternpirate put together a proof of concept for switching to a sideblog/secondary blog when liking or replying to posts. Using this hack, you’d be able to switch which of your blogs you’re “acting as” when hitting the like button or when replying to a post, to start. You’d even have separate Likes pages for each blog!

“One Year Ago” Dashboard Feed

André hacked together a feed which shows a portal backwards in time, to what the blogs you’re following were posting a year ago today:

Moving Android notification settings

On Android, Omar moved all of our notification settings out of the Tumblr app and into the Android OS level notifications settings view, like other apps do:

“Time for crab!” 🦀

@superchlorine hacked together a delightful button for the dashboard that summons crabs which scuttle across the page, and even comment on what they’re traipsing over:

As always, stay tuned to the @changes blog to see if any of these hacks make it on Tumblr for real!