This morning when I woke up and started up the internet, the unusual looking Tumblr Dashboard shocked me. What had happened to the Tumblr dashboard I had gotten to know and love? Its gone and has been replaced with something better (I hope.) I really like the new dash, it is more simple to use than the old one. It is also much easier to differentiate my own posts from the posts of my followers.

Posting is still easy as ever with the same icons and functions that it always has, with the exception of the added Audio functionality. I personally wouldn’t use it but its nice to know that the option if always there if I ever wanted to use it. They have also added some advanced features to it such as dating your posts and also add tags to posts. The tag functionality isn’t quite finished and doesn’t do much right now but it will be extremely useful for searching and browsing in the near future.

Moving the friends and followers off the dashboard was a good idea. Now they are on their own individual pages. The icons are bigger so you can actually see the faces of your friends and followers and it is not in the way for the dashboard and not slowing down the page loading as well as wasting bandwidth. It would be nice though if we could still see the number of followers on the dashboard too, just like the number of friends. Another thing that would be nice to do is have the option to hide or show friends posts in the dashboard. This could remove clutter if you wanted to go and find or edit one of your own posts from a day or so ago without having your friends posts making this a little harder and time consuming.

Channels is something new they have added into Tumblr. I didn’t quite understand the feature at first but now I think I get it. Channels are a way to share things with a group of people, and its private. Only people in the channel will be able to see the content. They are going to expand the functionality of this feature by adding multi-author tumblelogs and the ability to make it public. This is another feature I’m not sure I would use but if I found a use for it, I would definitely use it as I really love the Tumblr engine.

They have reconstructed the Theme editor. I personally am not fussed over the new editor and prefer the old, simple one. Previewing the theme has been made easy and its much better than the old preview. I think its great that they have added some user created themes (from Bill Israel and Cameron Hunt) to the theme library. These guys have made amazing themes and I believe that its wonderful their works of art have been discovered and have been added. Off to the side now, the theme editor is the only place on the whole site that I managed to find the old Tumblr flower logo. I really liked that logo and would like to see it put back, and for it to become the favicon rather than the ‘T’ that is currently there. The Tumblr flower would look much better there in the tabs bar.

But now is the part of the post where I talk about the things lacking and things that I believe would make the service better. I have to do it and creative criticism is good because it helps a service grow into something good. I only have a few gripes about Tumblr, one is the fact that none of the advance features are in the bookmarklet. I use the bookmarklet for 99% of the posts I make on Tumblr, it would be nice if I could click a link and it would expand the advance options so I can tag and date posts right from there instead of going to the dashboard and editing posts to add tags and such.

On the topic of tags, when the feature is fully enabled and search and browsing via tags is usable, Tumblr should have an easy way to tag older content. At the moment the only way would be so scramble through the dashboard looking for your posts and editing them. For a lot of people, doing it this way would become impractical due to the fact that they have made thousands of posts and editing them all to add tags would be a nightmare. Also having your content mixed with others just makes the task more daunting. What is going to end up happening is people won’t bother to use the tag feature and a lot of functionality will be missed. Somehow, make an easy tag system for tagging posts without any tags so you can make sure any great content isn’t lost in the giant archives of the Tumblr.com.

There are a lot of other things under the hood and small changes that I haven’t felt the need to mention. I wish I had someone to make a new custom theme for my Tumblelog so I can catch up and have Yum9me’s Scrapbook v3 and can have a nice makeover like the main site. Anyone who is moderately interested in this service would be insane not to jump on board and at least give Tumblr a go. It is one of the web services that I love the most on the internet and I am very excited to see it grow and grow and grow. Another great update from the people at Davidville and best wishes on your next projects and Tumblr v4