staff:

After several weeks of parsing through your feedback and making adjustments, the new Dashboard nav is up!

Just two things to note:

• To fix the issue with unnecessary unread counts on blogs you’re already following, we now only show unread counts for private blogs.
• We’re about to totally overhaul the Directory, along with the Activity page and Tumblarity which power it. In preparation, we’ve taken both of these pages offline while we make changes. More soon!

staff:

If you weren’t seeing your “Tumblr crushes” on the Following page, we just fixed a bug that was incorrectly hiding it for some people.

staff:

This is addictive.

Welcome to the revamped Popular page, featuring Tumblr Wire.

Wire pulls posts in realtime from across Tumblr, and has already become the single biggest distraction at Tumblr HQ.

We’re also featuring Trending Tags that have seen increasing activity over the last 48 hours.

Enjoy!

staff:

One of the most exciting aspects of localizing Tumblr has been dealing with images that contain text.  As I am only fluent in English, this presents an interesting problem—are the buttons legible (or pretty, for that matter) in other languages?  If you speak Japanese and are familiar with graphic design and typography, please contact me. I’d love some advice on font choices, kerning, and anything else I should know.

These translations are not final. If you would like to participate in the Japanese beta, please email nihongo@tumblr.com

staff:

Now testing: Ask Me

The new Ask feature lets your friends or readers ask questions that you can choose to answer on your blog.

You can enable it from your new Messages page (where we’re about to start adding a bunch of new messaging options!).

They even come with a bunch of new theme variables for designers to format them:

{block:AskEnabled}
    <a href="/ask">{AskLabel}</a>
{/block:AskEnabled}

{block:Answer}
    <div class="answer">
        <div class="question">{Question}</div>

        <span class="asker">
            <img src="{AskerPortraitURL-24}"/>
            {Asker}
        </span>

        <div class="answer">{Answer}</div>
    </div>
{/block:Answer}

Enjoy!

staff:

colinmeloy:

I have the raddest wife & son ever.  One of their many collaborations…L

Let’s just say there has been a lot of SQUEALING from my side of the office this week.

Since its inception, Colin Meloy’s Tumblr has given me such varied and squealworthy insights into his soul as:

1. his feelings on Depeche Mode (conflicted).
2. the type of bird-themed inlay featured on what is presumably photo of his guitar (adorable).
3. and, perhaps my favorite: these scanned in pictures that his wife/Carson Ellis/Decemberists album artist extraordinaire, and son drew together in their happy little notebook. Dinosaurs! Astronauts! BLINKING EYES, people!

I think part of why this is so interesting is that Colin Meloy and The Decemberists’ music is the kind of stuff that, as JD Salinger has already said much better than I, makes you wish he was “a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.”

In the meantime I will be following him on Tumblr and reblogging pictures of his wife’s Moleskine.

I suggest you do the same.

staff:

This is addictive.

Welcome to the revamped Popular page, featuring Tumblr Wire.

Wire pulls posts in realtime from across Tumblr, and has already become the single biggest distraction at Tumblr HQ.

We’re also featuring Trending Tags that have seen increasing activity over the last 48 hours.

Enjoy!

staff:

Thank you, really, for bearing with the nighttime Dashboard slowdowns during the last few weeks.

As it turns out, we blew past our February traffic projections yesterday, and served more than 700M impressions over the last 30 days.  We were a bit unprepared.

But our scaling guru, Andrew Terng, has been working furiously to get new equipment online and serving the Dashboard faster than ever. Stay tuned!

staff:

From taufiq:

In art class today, I passed a piece of paper round the class with the heading “What do you think Tumblr is?”.

Little do they know that they were no where near what Tumblr actually is.

staff:

Happy birthday Marco!

Marco’s older today, and we forgot to get him anything. Any ideas?

Starbucks gift certificate?  PC netbook?  Julia Allison?

Funny fact: When I hired Marco three years ago, I lied about my age because I was embarrassed about hiring someone 4 years older than me (and not being able to get into bars).