laceblade: Rachel & Santana giving sideeye just past the viewer. (Glee: Pezberry look)
laceblade ([personal profile] laceblade) wrote2013-03-29 10:51 pm

Tumblr Tutorial Notes

I left this as a comment in [livejournal.com profile] sophy's journal, & then figured it may be universally helpful.

xkit is an extension for Tumblr, & it has made my Tumblr!use infinitely better. If you use Tumblr, I HIGHLY recommend doing it.
xkit does a bunch of stuff - it lets you blacklist certain tags (most people use it for fandoms they dgaf about, like I blacklist Teen Wolf, but I also blacklist stuff that can sometimes make me feel shitty - "food porn," "coffee," etc. Also super helpful if you dislike seasonal shit, like when everyone reblogs the same 10 photosets around Christmas or etc.).
It lets you reblog yourself (the Tumblr site doesn't).
It wraps tags, so that if someone writes like 20 tags that go beyond the width of the post-box, it'll put them on separate lines so you can actually read them all.
It makes it way easier to reply to replies that people leave on your blog.
It also has a feature that lets you download music files when someone blogs/reblogs music.

A FEW NON-INTUITIVE THINGS:
--If you reblog a picture/post/gifset and don't have much to say other than, "This is cute!" or "She's my favorite character" or "I hope X sees this!" or whatever, you don't put those comments (aka "feels") in the body of the post. Rather, you include them as tags. People who are following you can see your tags. But when the person who originally made the picture/post/gifset looks at the hella long list of people who reblogged them, they won't see 50,000 people's "feels."
--When you reply to people with a new post, list their user name as one of the first 5 tags.
--For this reason, your Tumblr username should be a tag that you track, so you can see people talking to you.
--Only the first 5 tags "count." This means that if you tag something "glee," "lea michele," "pezberry," "santana lopez," "i kissed a girl," & "fanfiction," then the post will NOT show up in the fanfiction tag, nor will it show up in any tag that you list after those first 5. Your followers will still see them, though! So this is why I generally tag in order of importance - "glee," "lea michele," & then my personal tags later - "lea feelings," "lea pls," etc. Some people write paragraphs in their tags. It's cool.
--In addition to leaving comments on the posts of people you follow (& sometimes people only allow comments from those they follow back - so if you can't find the comment button, that's why), everyone on Tumblr also has an "ask" box. You can leave a message there, & the user can either respond to you publicly (by making a new post in which they'll hopefully tag you with your user name), or if it's a sensitive question/statement, respond privately. It'll then show up in your own ask box.

I AM MOSTLY ADEPT AT TUMBLR, so ask me questions if you have them?!
I know that a lot of people dislike it, but I fucking love Tumblr. It is second only to Twitter for me.

PS I am [tumblr.com profile] ribbonknight :)
amie: (Default)

[personal profile] amie 2013-03-31 06:44 am (UTC)(link)
I'm not frequently there but following you :)
hebethen: (Default)

[personal profile] hebethen 2013-04-01 10:30 pm (UTC)(link)
That's really interesting! I guess it's because I mostly posted and read text-heavy posts (rather than super popular gif sets or w/e), but I actually preferred when people wrote whatever in the reblog itself, since I was always interested in what people had to say and Tumblr makes it super hard to find a textless reblog.
ariad: (mucc // tatsurou)

[personal profile] ariad 2013-04-03 06:10 am (UTC)(link)
Augh, I wish so much that xkit would work for me, but it gives me an error when I try to install it! Sadness.

I would add to the list that:
--Reblogs don't appear in tracked tags.
--Hyphenated tags are not searchable.
--It is generally polite to tag posts by fandom so that people who are currently watching/reading a thing or who are upset by seeing a lot of something they dislike on their dash can easily block it.
--But it is generally not polite to use tracked tags on posts like "I'm watching this tonight!" because nobody in the tracked tag cares and it clogs the tag up.
--Some people who want to tag their posts for easy blockage but who don't want their posts to appear in tracked tags use personal fandom tags. (e.g., A friend of mine uses "clyde holmes watson" for Elementary, and worstwolf used to use "HOLD ME ABBIE" for The Avengers.)

I really like tags.