Category: Commentary

Here’s something interesting I just heard about. Tumbex is an alternate site for viewing tumblr posts, including the adult ones. I’m not entirely clear if they found a way to partially bypass the adult content block, or if this is only an archive of stuff from before that. But it seems surprisingly complete, and considering it’s difficult to view adult blogs at all now, this might be a handy tool for some of you.

Here, for example, are the two blogs Daican-2 mentioned on the discussion page a little while ago.

ENF Captions 2.0 (nakedenfcaptions)

Captions Of Nakedness (captionsofnakedness)

Got any other old favorites? Feel free to share them in the comments.

This was inspired by Daican-2’s flood of activity. Hehe, no that’s not a problem, but it occurred to me that comments aren’t very “discoverable” once they drop off the recent list (of 10) on the sidebar and the post they’re attached is no longer on the front page.

So I added a special page where you can see the last 50 100 comments. It also shows the whole comments, not just the name of author and post it was on. I don’t know how popular this will be, so rather that put it on the main navigation bar, it’s accessible by clicking “More…” under the regular Recent Comments list in the sidebar. (And as I’ve mentioned before, when I “sidebar” that translates to “bottom of the page” for mobile.) Anyway, it’s there, if anyone feels the need to catch up on recent discussion.

On a vaguely related note, something that also came up recently: If you make a sufficiently embarrassing typo or other error in a comment, don’t hesitate to reply to yourself asking me to fix it. Like “EDIT baked=naked” or whatever, and I’ll fix it and delete the extra comment. Or you can just redo the whole comment correctly and reply to the old one asking me to delete it, that works too. Anyway, it’s only a tiny bit of work for me, and since I was never able to find a practical way to let you edit your own comments directly, I don’t mind taking care of it from time to time.

If you tried to visit in the last hour or two, you might have been greeted with a database error.

Sorry about that. Nothing serious though, apparently my host had some kind of urgent software update they needed to take care of.

Or at least I hope so. Pretty sure.

The important part: Dark Mode should now consistently stay on (or off) between pages, and between visits (ON setting remembered for 1 month). I’ve removed the “Dark mode quick access” thing at the top of the page, because it was a little bit ugly, and shouldn’t be needed now that the setting stays set.

Technical details: Feel free to skip if this doesn’t interest you.

I’m using WP Night Mode to add that feature, but by default, another plugin, WP Super Cache doesn’t know how to handle it. This was the source of all the problems. However WP Super Cache does have a built in feature for excluding logged-in users. So taking advice from someone who reported a similar issue, I edited WP Night Mode so that its cookie is named “wordpress_logged_in_DarkMode”. This fools WP Super Cache into thinking the user is logged in, so they are excluded form the cache. This is a hack, obviously, but it seems to be working. There’s supposed to a better way to do this so that Dark Mode users would get their own separate cache, but frankly I don’t know by way around WordPress well enough to understand how to get that working. So this will have to do. It’s not perfect, it does mean Dark Mode users will experience slightly slower page loads, but for now at least it I’m happy to have it not be completely broken.

New poll, if you’d like to let me know how it’s working.

A few users have reported Dark Mode turning on when it isn’t supposed to.

If you’ve got a moment, please answer this quick poll to help me get a sense of how widespread the problem is.

You can vote even if you haven’t used it at all. It’s still a useful data point.

One of the tumblr replacements some people are working on is called MojoFire. It’s still not live yet, but they seem serious about making something of it.

The reason I mention it now, is that they’re offering tumblr users a chance to claim their same username ahead of anyone else. You can do so here if that sounds interesting.

Naturally I can’t vouch for any of this, they’ve been rather light on the specific details to be honest, but assuming it works out, it will presumably a) be somewhat similar to tumblr, and b) allow adult content. Don’t really know anything beyond that.

Someone asked for a “dark mode” option, and since the WordPress update is out of the way with no serious issues, I went ahead and hunted down a plug-in to add that. It requires JavaScript of course, but it’s pretty slick. I put the control at the bottom of the sidebar on the right (or very bottom of the page on mobile). It looks this:

Night Mode

That’s also a working control, if you’d like to try it right now.

Anyway, I may refine it a little bit, but I’ll probably stick with the normal view myself for the most part, so let me know if you encounter any problems (e.g. things that become invisible, hard to read, etc).

Alright, here goes. I’ve probably been making too big a deal of this. More likely than not it’ll go smoothly.

Edit: Done. Well mostly. I still haven’t updated the theme because it breaks some things, but that’s actually a really old issue. The good news is the old version still seems to be working fine after upgrading WordPress, one of the main things I was worried about.

Everything seems to be working. Tested submissions and such. I’m almost surprised nothing broke except the one thing I expected to. :p

As I mentioned a little while ago, there’s a major WordPress update it’s been bugging me to install, and with Christmas and the tumblr drama both behind us I’ll probably be working on that soon. Maybe it will go really smoothly and you won’t even notice a difference, but since this is my first major version change (4.xx to 5.0) I won’t be surprised if there are a few hiccoughs.

So one piece of data I’d like to collect is how all you feel about the current super retro/minimalist theme. I definitely have no intention making it all flashy with unnecessary animation and stuff, and compatibility with older devices and browsers is also important to me. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it needs to look like it came from 1995. That was just a style I picked out way back when I started on tumblr to make a point or something.

Would it be too shocking if I switched to something more modern? Or conversely do any of you dislike the current style and wish I would do that?

I thought I’d share my experience with two tumblr back-up options: TumblThree, and tumblr’s internal export command. (Once again, the latter can be reached by going to settings, clicking your blogs name on the right, then scrolling to the bottom of the page.) First, TumblThree. It gets the job done. It’s actually a tad buggy, it’s has frozen up or otherwise misbehaved a couple times, but with a little persistence I’ll do what you need. A few tips:

• When adding a blog, you need to write the whole URL, like http://nudeworldordernet.tumblr.com/ (not https, BTW).
• If you’re into captioned pics, you probably want to turn on “download image meta”, so it saves the text that goes with each image. You can do that either in the settings before you add blogs, or turn it on for each blog in the details pane on the right, after adding them.
• The format text gets downloaded in kinda sucks. But at least everything’s there.

For the build-in export option, the number one thing you need to know is that it’s slow. Slower than you’re thinking. No, slower than that. It takes days to process. And I tested it on my little emergency blog that has hardly any content. (Probably that means it’s first-come-first serve and a ton of people are using it, for obvious reasons, but it’s still kind of ridiculous.) Anyway, you click the export button and it’ll say “Backup Processing…”, then a few days later you get an email that your backup is ready and you can do download it. So that’s the big downside. Well that and the fact you can only use it on your own blog of course. But on the positive side, text is saved in a more readable format, and it can download things TumblThree can’t, such as draft posts and conversations from the Messaging feature. The last weird little thing is the archive comes as a zip file, but at first glance it appeared to be empty despite it’s 5MB (in my case) size. I don’t know what the heck is up with that, but if that happens to you, try opening it with 7Zip, that worked for me.

So bottomline, both have pluses and minuses, so I’d suggest backing up your own blog using both, and turning TumblThree loose on any other adult blogs you’d you’d like to save the content of. I’ve saved over 100GB of nudity over the last few days, which is insane, but are you gonna do, eh? Anyway, if you’re thinking of doing this, don’t wait. TumblThree will be useless after the 17th. I think tumblr intends to initially only hide (not delete) adult content so tumblr’s internal export function should still work, but why risk it? If you’ve got a blog you care about, start the export process now.

As long as I’m at it, here’s a big list of tumblr-alternatives. Seem pretty complete. Although they didn’t mention my own solution of paying for a host and running your own WordPress blog (not the same as wordpress.com).