Got Richard Armitage-related tumblr tips?

I posted a bunch of tumblr links to fanfic for the first time in the last Legenda, and got a comment that resonated me with about the difficulty of navigating tumblr.

I also find tumblr frustrating to navigate. I wish multipart fanfic authors would include a link in the previous chapter that led to the next one, like many LJ authors do. But there’s also a ton of good Richard Armitage stuff appearing on tumblr, especially if you like graphics and animated GIFs. I even started my own tumblr, but I haven’t used it very much yet, because I’m still coming to terms. Also, I had a specific idea for what I wanted to put there, which I haven’t had time to realize yet. (Being back at my desk reminds just exactly how derailed I was for the whole summer. Grrr. Sigh. Shrug.)

I asked a friend this week who spends a lot of time there, and she offered the following three, very basic, tips, for people who want to read on tumblr.

• Get a free tumblr account. Once you are logged into it (you can simply stay logged in), follow people who post the kinds of things you’re interested in. As they reblog stuff from other people, click onto those blogs and follow those people as well. When you’re logged in, follow is always an option (usually in the upper right somewhere), so you can hit that once and then come back to your tumblr account periodically to look at your dashboard, where you will see a whole stream of everything the bloggers that you follow publish.
• If you follow the links from this blog to individual chapters, you may have a hard time finding other chapters. (I may try to remedy that in future by linking to all chapters I can find.) In that case, you should click the title of the blog at the top, which will take you to the homepage. You then scroll down the homepage to see everything that is posted on that blog.
• Finally, you have the option to search by tags, although you can only search one tag at a time. The posts will show up starting with the most recent.

I think those are all useful tips for readers. Concisely put, too. They don’t address my main problems, though.

I personally have two main issues with tumblr.

• One is that it seems to eat a lot of web juice because of the images. From my perspective, it’s not a site for anyone on a manky wifi connection — which is where I’m often located. I have a T-1 at work, but the computer I have there is so old and underpowered that I don’t usually use that machine to surf the net. A little googling suggests that reading tumblr with Google Chrome as opposed to Firefox makes it a little easier to load. I’m meh on contributing further to the hegemony of Google, though.
• My second issue is that I can’t always figure out how to do what I want inside of tumblr, even from the dashboard. I also have the problem of wanting to find the original source of something and being led down a rabbit trail because I can’t figure out how to find the hyperlink to the information I actually want in the maze of hearts and comments and reblogs. I don’t feel like the interface is very intuitive. But that’s me — okay, once upon a time I actually typed in commands to use a word processor (anyone remember WordStar?) but sometime in college I assimilated the MSWord toolbar, knowledge of which makes using the WP seem elementary.

Any tumblr people out there who would care to weigh in about how to use the tumblr part of the Armitage blogosphere most effectively? What do you do to see the stuff you want? What’s fun for you about the tumblr world?

And what are your favorite tumblrs? I have a few linked in the sidebar here that I like, but I think they are all of people who have left a comment here. I follow many more at my tumblr, but I admit that I’m not there every day, either, and haven’t tried to make my follow list comprehensive. Frenz posted a nice interview with the blogger of Recycled Vinyl here, that gives a little intro to tumblr, but as Frenz herself noted elsewhere (can’t find it at the moment), the tumblr world changes extremely quickly.

~ by Servetus on September 6, 2012.