to collect in a mass

Added Tumblr Notes / Rebloggers To Each Post

UPDATED (4/11/2008): The problems described in this post have been fixed.  I also decided to leave the reblog comments instead of requiring you to hover over some text to see them.

UPDATE: Like with most version 1.0 solutions, I got feedback and made changes. On permalink posts, there’s a link in the sidebar for posts with reblog notes, and the notes will slide down.  On index pages, if there are notes, a “show reblog notes” link will show up and exhibit the same sliding behavior.  There are still issues with one of the services I use to enable this which results in some posts with notes not actually appearing to have notes.  Other times, the notes will be missing information like usernames or user icons.  I feel like that’s pretty much out of my hands, unfortunately.

During my conversation with joelaz about accessing Tumblr notes and what you could do with them, he mentioned that it would be neat to display the notes alongside a post . I really liked that idea, so I added that information to my sidebar. You can see it on “post” pages that have reblogging activity (give it a second to load). It’s designed to not show anything if there haven’t been any reblogs relating to the post. If there are reblogs, then you’ll see the rebloggers’ icons and usernames, as well as who they each reblogged it from. I’ve set it up so that the icon will always link to that user’s main page, and the username will link to that user’s reblog post if they added anything to it; otherwise, it will also link to that user’s main page. That’s a limitation of the data available in the notes page. If you hover over the reblogger’s username, you’ll see some of the text that they added, if they added anything.

Unfortunately, my experience with one of the web services I used (Dapper) to make this has been quite frustrating, and I’ve wasted hours trying to get it to work on both posts with many reblogs and posts with only a few reblogs. It doesn’t seem to want to do both, so I left it working for posts with (what appear to be) more than three reblogs. I wouldn’t even need Dapper if Yahoo Pipes did something I think it should, and I’ve given feedback to the Pipes team about it. Anyway, here are some posts where you can see the rebloggers list in action:

http://coacervo.tumblr.com/post/25255357

http://coacervo.tumblr.com/post/24798348

http://coacervo.tumblr.com/post/27649141

http://coacervo.tumblr.com/post/23845269

http://coacervo.tumblr.com/post/23859873 (4 reblogs and it works)

Here are some posts where there are reblogs (click the “Show/Hide Notes” link above the footer to see them if you’re using Firefox) but no rebloggers listed in the sidebar:

http://coacervo.tumblr.com/post/23377331 (3 reblogs and it doesn’t work)

http://coacervo.tumblr.com/post/25077239 (3 reblogs, again)

http://coacervo.tumblr.com/post/26267925 (2 reblogs)