Tumblr Hack Day, March 2023 Edition
Well well well, it was Hack Day once again at Tumblr. A few times per year we slow down our normal work and spend a day (or sometimes a whole week) working on whatever we want and see how far we can get with our hacks. Here are some of the projects that got made for our most recent Hack Day earlier this month. Some of these things you may also end up seeing on the site…
Wesley worked on adding the ability to translate the text content of posts using LibreTranslate, which works really well! We know this is a big pain point for folks who use Tumblr around the world, so we’re excited to keep experimenting with this.
Omar built a Feature Wishlist for the Android app, which has different lists for community-driven and staff-driven feature ideas, with the ability to upvote which ones you’d like the most! Really cool, we’re trying to think of ways like this to expand what we can do to collaborate with the community, like we already do with the @wip and @changes blogs.
One thing that’s been bugging @blowery forever is trying to figure out who exactly added the tags when you’re viewing a reblog of a post. It can be hard to tell whether the person reblogging it added the tags, or if they’re meant to come from the reblogged post. To help distinguish this, they hacked together putting the reblogger’s avatar next to the tags they added at the bottom of their reblog!
@straku hacked together a more modern look for our 1:1 messaging on Tumblr, bringing the message bubbles into a left-and-right back-and-forth format, and using some better colors. Looks a lot snazzier!
As always, stay tuned to the @changes blog to see if any of these hacks make it on Tumblr for real!
