Tumblr crop

I’ve mentioned Tumblr before, and of course link to my tumblelog in the sidebar here.

On saturday I saw that Tumblr 3.0 was announced with “Over 400 new features, fixes, and improvements“.

A tumblelog is a sort of quick post a link, video, photo, quote sort of tool:

Tumblr Menu

Not the place to post long thoughtful blogs, but a pretty easy way to found objects from the net. The presentation is nice too, huge fonts, auto imbedding of flickr photos and youtube video, this facility has be expanded to Tumblr will now take any video or Flash embed code and scale it down proportionally. The new feature that really impresses me is the way tumblr shows my Archive (like the screenshot at the top of this post). Very sweet in my opinion. tumblr now does audio upload and has tied in with Vimeo to allow video upload. also included with tumblr 3.0 are tags, markdown, channels (which is a move towards multi-author tumblelogs) and a pile of other stuff, best read on the announcement.

I don’t know any other teachers using tumblr yet, but I’d be interested in playing around with this, so let me know if you want to post to the edutumblrs channel and I’ll invite you in. No link as yet as channels are private at the moment. I am also on the lookout for folk interested in the same sort of things as myself to follow in tumblr.

At the monet I post wee links to games and fun that I think my pupils will like to a sub-weblog here, which appears in the side bar of Sandaig Otters and as a web page encorporated int othe main sandaig site: Links for Children and Staff at Sandaig, but this could be a lot prettier as a tumblelog.

&my_tumblelogTumblr

After talking about it I decided to try out a tumblelog, using in this case Tumblr: John’s Tumbelog. Tumblr is a very nice application and keeps things clean and basic, there are half a dozen types of post; text, photo, quote, link, chat and video which are all easy to make either from the dashboard, a bookmark flavlet, mobile or a OS X widget. The bookmarklet is pretty smart, if you are on a flickr page it pretty much does it all for you, same with youtube, if you have some text selected on a web page and hit the bookmarklet it knows you want a quote, pulls the text and link into the popup window and all you need to do is click Create Quote. Nothing selected and it knows you want to create link.

It takes about 2 minutes working slowly to set up Tumblr the whole interface is clear, the blogs created look good and you can tweek the css with a nice web interface or just choose a template.

I don’t think tumblr blogs would be useful for primary pupils but they might have a place in sending interesting videos, links etc to you pupils if you don’t want the hassle of setting up a blog and just want to let the children see the content. For someone with a large numbr of readers it could be a nice way to share links and ideas alongside del.icio.us.

For myself It seems a fun tool but I don’t know if I would get the readership. For the moment I’ve folded my into my SuprGlu aggregation..

Interestingly the official tumblr blog uses wordpress the explanation highlights some of the differences between tumblelogs and blogs as does kottke: tumblelogs and Wikipedia

Tumblr is in very active development, scanning the last few post on the Davidville blog gives hints, there is an API, quicksliver hooks, a Pro version in the works and some community building.

Tools

imagewell_paparazzi I’ve been using a few new to me/rediscovered desktop tools over that last couple of weeks (pc users can turn away). I already blogged about ImageWell which is a great image prep and upload app for quick annotation, resizing and adding drop shadows without opening a big image application. The more I use it the more I am impressed.
my Flickr tagged imagewell.

I’ve also been using Paparazzi! which is a screenshot for webpages application.
I wanted to get a screenshot of my tumblelog but include more than one entry which was way off the screen Paparazzi lets you do that. You then can drag the image from Paparazzi to ImageWell resize it, optionally add a drop shadow and notes and then upload to flickr (or dotmac, or ftp etc), very quickly indeed.
The top image I dragged to the desktop and then dragged that file to TextMate while writing this post, the one on the right I sent to flickr with ImageWell. (I really love the drag and drop stuff when using a mac, especially when combined with command tab to move through applications).
Another handy free tool for grabbing screenshots is desktopple this hides the icons on your desktop so you can get nice clean screenshots, and set the background colour. Together with the usual screenshot keystrokes these apps make a great image to blog workflow at no cost.

desktopple