Something That All The People Shouting "the Twitter Invasion Will Ruin Tumblr!!!!!" Are Not Understanding

This is 100% new and 100% Tumblr with 0% ads.

If you love ads, then this post is not for you. If you love Tumblr but hate ads and want the one to continue without having to endure the other, then this post is literally for you. Hello, you.

As of today, you can set up ad-free browsing on your personal desktop computer, from anywhere in the world, and then enjoy the same effervescent Tumblr you know and love (yes, including mobile) without the interruption of ads. Scroll away.

Some caveats:

It’s $4.99 for a month of pure, unadulterated nonsense.

If you like a discount, you can get 33% off (that’s four months for free) at $39.99 for a whole year. Imagine.

This is opt-in. You don’t have to do this. We won’t make you.

How do you opt in?

Easy! Just go to your Account Settings on desktop and hit "Go Ad-Free." From there, you can choose to pay monthly or yearly:

And that’s it! You’ll be able to enjoy your favorite blogs and posts without any pesky ads getting in the way.

That’s all for now, Tumblr. Back to your blorbos.

“It’s a bit like the Hotel California.”

— General relativity professor, discussing black holes

Thanks to CEO Jeff D'Onofrio for his 8 years at Tumblr. He was here for everything from the skeleton war to the Ever Given, but now he’ll be listening to the music playing from another room. ❤️

This just in: A man in France has reportedly gotten his hand trapped in a bread mixer

Witnesses report he is in pain

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!

Ok, some time ago someone suggested we should do a quick post with tips & trips for the beta editor, and I'm in the mood this morning, so let me put on my work hat for a sec and write a serious post about what we are doing with it. To mark this as a serious post, let me even add a title:

Beta editor tips and tricks

Uhh, getting all fancy here. Anyway, jokes aside, let me share a few details that make using the beta editor a pretty nice experience, and you may not be aware of (or at least, some of them!)

1. The Drawer

See, my favorite feature, the one I use most often, and the one I think it's more useful when writing tumblrstuff, it's the / drawer. When you are at the start of a new line and write /, a drawer gets open where you can, using only your keyboard, select what do you want to happen in that line:

It allows you to select the text style without having to write first and then select the text to change it. It also allows for media blocks insertion (which I don't use quite often, but hey, maybe you do!)

2. Quick links!

There's this great way to add links to a post that ... well, after using it, any other way feels pretty terrible. Just copy whatever url you want to link, write the text, select it and paste the url ... boom, link created!

3. Image handling

Yeah, the image sets have been pretty borken on the beta editor for a long time. We know, we are sorry. But we have been working a lot in the last couple of months on that area and now it's so much better! functional, even!

4. Tag! Tags!!! TAGSSSS!!!

You may know this already because it has been widely reblogged, but now you can edit tags in the beta editor!

5. Down to Markdown

Well, if for some reason you like to write your posts using markdown, but you don't like the beta editor (admittedly spartan) markdown mode, you can just use whatever fancier editor you like, copy/paste the markdown text, and see it being converted from engineerlish to well-adjusted-humanlish format before your eyes!

And well, that's all I can think of on this sunny morning on the outskirts of Madrid. We keep working on it heavily, so cool things are coming! I don't really feel comfortable leaking any incoming features that I'm not directly working at, so I better shut up before I tell you about sdlgkjsñlgkl

Another Tumblr dev: [appears out of nothing] Another Tumblr dev: [kicks my keyboard out of the window] Me: hey!! that was my good keyboard! Now I'll have to write on my laptop, like a nerd!

Questions coming up from….

@teamadamsperret: Congrats on your PhD!! When people ask what you do, what's your reply?

@Anonymous: How does it feel, working in NASA?

@moonlighy: How did you find your love for this job?

@redbullanddepression: what the prettiest star in the sky in your opinion? also, you are a great role model as a queer woman who is attending university next year to major in aerospace engineering!!!

me @ France right now

it's real