Featurequests

Since I never can settle for simple-but-not-yet-there interfaces, I decided to collect a short list of things that I would like to improve on.

Shortcuts in the linkbar

Number one feature for always-around type of user is instant access to editing via small linkbar with links to sign out and “publish” section. It’s great, but lacks links to instant posting. Yeah, those:

Regular Post | Photo | Quote | Link | Conversation | Video

So I suppose that linkbar in the screenshot above could be somewhat improved with those links placed instead of “Add/Edit link” (which could be consequently renamed to “Edit/Settings”). Less clicks to post — happier blogger. No?

Documentation!

Tumblr is great in many ways (especially great for its simplicity and fo so much automagic inside), but I miss some helpful hints: about using different things in theme template (how many date formats are there? How does the whole post/date looping work? Etc.) and about defaults such as HTML filtering (can we have the list of what’s going the way of dodo? Filtering seemingly filters out perfectly normal H3 tags so I had to turn it off for myself).

Some tutorials or some blog posts about advanced usage and techniques would be great, but I guess you guys at Davidville would consider it an overkill…

UPD: Oh well, there’s already some nice progress on custom themes documentation!

Smoothed edges

There are also some minor things (no links to homepage/FAQ from /publisher* pages, no table of contents in FAQ for quick scanning, no form of feedback for signed-in users - it would be more fun than email, featured blogs section on the homepage is kind of short, so I have to refer to blog for more samples) which also could be improved (already in the works along with other cool stuff, and started to come true as Tumblr Radar), but it’s more of a “next thing to do after we’re done” and an icing on the cake. I could really use link to the homepage, but FAQ isn’t of much use to me now as it’s quite hollow after I got thru the first several stages/steps.

External access

As good as planned API might be, support of Metaweblog API or Atom might enable users to come with their favourite blog-clients, which might help to make posting even more convinient. Link post types to the “categories” in metaweblog api, and everything should work without any issues, I guess.

Some other stuff (added here as I find new stuff of note):

• In the theme preview there’s no prev/next paging link example. (Increase number of test posts or decrease number of blogs per page for preview?)
• Page titles are all the same (for /publisher and all — otherwise all the open tabs in browser seem to be the same faceless “Tumblr”: Tumblr, again Tumbler, yet again Tumbler. And browser history is all the same — whether it was homepage or settings, post text or post link — they are absolutely all the same.