tj:
How To Reblog Yourself on Tumblr
UPDATE 2011-04-07: The best way to reblog yourself is to use Missing E for Google Chrome, Safari, or Firefox.
The Older/Harder Way
See update at bottom of this page for “an easier way”…
Have you ever wanted to reblog yourself?
Maybe you posted something and wanted to repost it for people who are in a different timezone, or maybe you wanted to do that “Throwback Thursday” thing, or maybe you posted something that you thought was funny but it was before you had many followers on Tumblr so few people saw it.
I’m not here to judge, people.
Ok, I am here to judge, but not about this in particular.
So, how is it done? Tumblr doesn’t show you the option for reblogging yourself. Previously the only way that I knew how to do this was to create a completely separate Tumblr account, login to it, and then load the page and then copy the “reblog” URL, then login to your other account and use the URL that you copied.
Fairly painful and awkward. Dan Wineman asked me how I was doing this, and he made a comment asking if I was doing some sort of trick to get the “code” from Tumblr. I got curious to see if there was an easier way to do this than the process I just described, and sure enough there is.
My “solution” is still fairly geeky. Before this becomes “easy” for anyone to do, someone who knows JavaScript will have to figure out a way to take what I’ve figured out and rewrite it into a bookmarklet or something so we can get “one click” reblogging.
However, we have to start somewhere, so here are the technical details.
Begin Technical Details Section
- Go to an URL for a specific post, such as
http://funsizebytes.com/post/33322292/what-are-you-saying-i-need-this
Step 2) View Source for the page. In Safari this is View > View Source. In Firefox its View > Page Source.
Step 3) Scroll aaaaaaalllllll the way down until you see a line which begins with
<!-- BEGIN TUMBLR CODE --><iframe src="http://www.tumblr.com/dashboard/This will be the last line or two of the HTML source.
Step 4) Find the code after ‘;rk=’ In my example, it looks something like this
<!-- BEGIN TUMBLR CODE --><iframe src="http://www.tumblr.com/dashboard/iframe?src=http%3A%2F%2Ffunsizebytes.com%2Fpost%2F33322292%2F&pid=33322292&rk=0iMrrTcY" scrolling="no" width="324"See the “0iMrrTcY” after the “;rk=” and before the ‘scrolling=”no”’? Highlight and copy that code like you would do “Copy/Paste” in any app (control+c in Windows, command+c on a Mac). Close the window that opened when you did “View Source”.
Step 5) Change /post/ to /reblog/ For example, change this:
http://funsizebytes.com/post/33322292/to this
http://funsizebytes.com/reblog/33322292/and then paste the code that you copied onto the end so it looks like this:
http://funsizebytes.com/reblog/33322292/0iMrrTcYPress enter/return and voilà! You can now reblog yourself.
(Note that if you run multiple Tumblrs you may have noticed that Tumblr doesn’t always provide ‘Edit’ them. There may be a related way to figure out the “Edit” links for those posts.)
End of Technical Details Section
So now you can reblog yourself. Just don’t do it too often, you’ll annoy your followers and probably go blind. Definitely at least one of those.
As I said, this really won’t be “user friendly” until a better solution is developed. In the meantime, I figured out a solution using TextExpander using a custom shell script that I wrote. If you use TextExpander too, you might want to watch the video above or at Vimeo.
This is also an experiment for me to figure out how to use my screencasting software and how to do it better. I already see several things I could have improved upon, mostly zooming in to various things so they’d be easier to see. Not sure how to do that yet. Hopefully I’ll suck less at this the more I do it.
UPDATE:
Dan Wineman posted about a much easier way to do this.
