A couple of days ago, when I was browsing the deep space of Tumblr, I stumbled across an interesting post. I thought it seemed pretty cool so I gave it a try to see what results I would get and here is is as follows. If you would also like to try it out, and maybe post it on my blog or tumblelog or whatever, the instructions are also below. If you do, please pingback or leave a comment so I can see your results.

Type your answer to the questions into flickr search
-Using only the first page, pick an image
-Copy and paste each of the urls in the Mosaic Maker

1. What is your first name?
2. What is your favorite food?
3. What high school did you go to?
4. What is your favorite color?
5. Who is your celebrity crush?
6. What is your favorite drink?
7. What is your dream vacation?
8. What is your favorite dessert?
9. What do you want to do when you grow up?
10. Who / what do you love most in life?
11. Choose one word that describes you?
12. What is your Flickr name?

1. Jonathan Coulton’s GlaDOS Rock Band, 2. Melting Chocolate, 3. Robotic Lego, 4. Berlin blues, 5. Masi Oka and Hayden Panettiere - Interview (1), 6. Raspberry Coke, 7. Berlin, Germany, 8. Miniature Cakes, 9. My Computer, 10. Internet!!!, 11. ultimate geek nook, 12. Leopard

After the big blog update a week ago, a few more updates have happened elsewhere. The first is the yum9me.com main page. The old page has gone and been replaced by a simple page, written by TheSkorm in a few seconds. I like it over the older one because it is much cleaner, it works correctly on more browsers (curse you Internet Explorer!) and there is less clutter and jankness to it.

The second update was to my tumblelog theme. After using the dashboard theme for a little while, I started to lose interest in it and wanted a new theme, I just hadn’t seen any that I liked. That was until I saw a theme ported from a Wordpress theme on Alisha’s tumblelog, that’s when I knew what I wanted. I decided that I would use the Wordpress theme on this blog, and hopefully one day, she would be able to release the theme to the public.

Well that day did come shortly after, and managed to get back on my radar so I grabbed it. It wasn’t exactly how I wanted it so I modified it a little. The main modifications are the removal of the Disqus comment integration, and the Last.Fm and other site integrations. I also removed the followers down the sidebar. My intentions were to have a few links down the side for Mobile, Archives, RSS ect. I did have this working for a moment until during some other edit of the theme, it broke, so I completely removed it.

I also changed the description down the bottom of the theme to match that of the one on my blog, except with a couple of appropriate word changes and rearrangements. This is also where the about button will jump down to, if clicked. I also decided to have the links under the title be for my main page (or as I decided to call it, Portal,) my blog and my tumblelog. I also applied this to my blog.

I like how they both use the same theme because now they seem more unified and part of one system, which they are, instead of two separate unrelated sites. So hopefully all the changes can last a year or so before I decided to change them.

There have been many updates to my blog and tumblelog over the past few days. All the blog changes are hidden away. Peppery has been doing some stuff with servers and what have you, as well as updating the blog to Wordpress 2.6. On the tumblelog, the changes are more apparent, with a completely new look. The reason for the refresh was not because I felt like it, but because my old theme had disappeared from the internet. The full story, as what was posted on my tumblr, is as follows.

 Veronica Belmont recently wrote an article on her blog about how she doesn’t like Tumblr. The reason behind it was because of people aggregating their feeds into it. I don’t think that it is enough for you to not like a service because there is a lot more too it than that. I personally think that its the worst feature that Tumblr has but I get over it because very few of the people I follow do import their feeds into it.

But she does have very good points about people aggregating their feeds into sites like Tumblr. I think people shouldn’t do it, especially on Tumblr. Why you may ask, well it is because I don’t want to see your links and such on your tumblelog. If I want to see what you are twittering about, I will follow you on that and/or subscribe to your feed there. Same applies to your pictures, if I wanted to see your pictures, I would be following you on Flickr and seeing you pictures along with everyone elses pictures. This is also the case for all the other services that you are part of.

If I want to see various content, I want to see them together as a group. All my friends tweets, photos, blog post ect. on their own. I don’t want to see the content mixed up. I am fine with having everyone pictures together in a single feed for me to go through. The problem also is that if you do that, I am going to end u seeing your content twice. I don’t want to see it twice because it wastes time. In saying that, if you have something that everyone must see, for example, a very nice shot you took and uploaded to Flickr, that would be acceptable, I just don’t want your whole feed with all your pictures on your tumblelog, or any other service.

If you do that, people are going to get annoyed and frustrated and stop following you and unsubscribe from the feed, so in the long run, you lose. This is a greater loss if you actually use the service for what it was intended, the imported content clutters your actual content and you end up with a mess that few people are following because of it. In saying that, I am sure it is acceptable for you to have a place to import your feeds in one place to give to a contact, or contacts, that don’t follow you everywhere and would still like to see what you do online.

It would be good if there was a service that could deliver that and that only, aggregating content, not creating it. I am sure there are services that do that an I don’t think Tumblr is one of them, even though it is possible. I think it was a mistake to ever put that feature in to be honest. Anyway, I think it is unfair also for someone to dislike a service for something a feature on the site, one that the minority would use. Tumblr is a wonderful service and is definitely my favorite one of 2007. Please keep your feeds of my Tumblr

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

If you don’t already know, I have a Tumblelog hosted by Tumblr. I follow other peoples good tumblelogs, and people who have similar interests to me. I have recently been so annoyed and frustrated by two people I follow that it has resulted in me unfollowing them.

The first person I unfollowed annoyed me by spamming his twitter posts in his tumblelog. This results in about 20 post a day that consist of short messages taken from his twitter RSS feed. It is annoying because now my Tumblr dashboard is full of spam. Why would someone put spam in their tumblelog. If someone wanted to see your twitter posts, they would follow you there. There is no reason to move that into your tumblelog.

The second person annoyed me because I would see posts that they have reblogged off my tumblelog but they never sourced me. Everyone who has any kind of blog, whether its a full weblog, a tumblelog or even a microblog, they all source where they get things from. Its etiquette as well as common sense, well so I though. Unfollowing them isn’t going to stop them from not sourcing the people he gets content from but it mean I don’t have to see it, therefore can’t be that bothered by it.

So if anyone does these things, I am going to stop following them, whether it is on Tumblr, Twitter, a Blog or any other place online for that matter. Its annoying and frustrating! Don’t Spam and Source your posts! These things are so obvious but yet there are people that do it. I wonder how they would react if they were the one reading spam or the one that was having something they found or wrote and have that content used without sourcing!

Well if you are reading this, you are obviously aware of the changes. First off, the blog has been moved off Wordpress MU to an independent blog, it is still hosted my Word Dissociation though. It should look and work exactly the same as it did before with a few minor changes.

The theme is the same as well as most of the plugins. All the posts and comments were imported here so they aren’t gone either. The feed was changed so the Feedburner feed was pointing to the right place. This shouldn’t have effected you but you may have noticed previous posts appearing in your readers.

The only differences are the URL. It should be slightly easier to remember at http://yum9me.worddissociation.net. I am currently working on getting a dedicated domain for this blog and my Tumblr to make it easier to access my sites. There are also two new plugins for comments, Gravatar, which is a avatar service. You can sign up and assign your avatar at their site. The second is Firestats, which shows your country, OS and browser along with your comments.

It was extremely quick migration and would have been unnoticed to a lot of people. I would like to thank Peppery for providing this service to me and for his help with the blog, and other things online. Cheers to him!