Larry Hosken: New:

If you're on tumblr and I know you and I don't already follow you, let me know so I can follow you. Or you can follow me. Or whatever.

As Twitter continues to implode, I noticed some artistic types announce that they were going back to tumblr. I blew the dust off of my old tumblr account so I could follow them. An automatic service had been copying my blog posts over to tumblr all these years, so in one sense I was "active" on tumblr… but I wasn't paying attention, just broadcasting. But now I'm paying attention. And I noticed some people I know are there, so I followed the people I noticed.

tumblr blogs export RSS feeds. Thus you don't have to join tumblr to keep up with tumblr people, you can use a feed reader instead. But you have to join tumblr to click the ❤️ button to indicate you liked a blog post, so I'm glad I finally got my act together and logged in to tumblr so I could click ❤️ buttons.

Perhaps amusingly, when I got around to looking at tumblr I could see that the aut0matic thingy that copies my blog posts over was getting things almost right, but not exactly. E.g., when my blog post said "Want a hint? Click this hint button:" and then showed a button; tumblr didn't show a button, but instead showed the little computer program I'd written to make the button work. That wasn't very helpful. And when I posted a big table of USA states and their electoral college votes, on tumblr that displayed as an incoherent paragraph. So uhm yeah if you're on tumblr and you also have an RSS feed reader, maybe you want to not-follow me on tumblr and just use the feed reader so you can read my blog posts on something that will display them OK pretty consistently. But you should still tell me about your tumblr so I can follow it.