Tumble Tree

Well, Tumble tree is no longer in service.

Wed, 26 Sep 2012 06:30:17 -0400

Shame this thing died before it really got off the ground, but I’m not allowed to continue to offer Tumble tree as an app. Against terms of service, unable to be granted an exception, concerns about server load and the method in which it grabs the data, which is fair enough really.

Still, it’s been fun, I’ve become much more adept at pushing jQuery around in weird ways to do my evil bidding, and at manipulating the algorithms and parameters behind complex systems (the physics-based tree) to get just the right emergent properties (a nice shaped tree). Blah blah blah.

Feel free to follow me on my normal Tumblr for intermittent updates on the building of a skateboarding game and weird animated GIFs, or my music project Tumblr if you like electronic not-dance music (new album coming in the next couple of months!), or even my normal site at dxinteractive.com.

Thanks for being a good audience!

Maybe speak to the guy who runs missing e for ideas?

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 05:05:59 -0400

Perhaps, but they got around the issue by removing the parts of Missing-e that did page-scraping - not an option for me as this whole thing relies on it.

Damn. Well unless anyone has any idea about who to contact at Tumblr, this Tumble Tree is looking a...

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 04:38:57 -0400

Damn. Well unless anyone has any idea about who to contact at Tumblr, this Tumble Tree is looking a bit dead. Tried emailing Tumblr support, followed up when they didn’t reply. Still no reply. Sent another fresh one, no reply. Any ideas who I can contact?

Better explain why the tree is no longer operational

Sun, 02 Sep 2012 03:31:04 -0400

Anyone active in using this tool will have noticed that it has not been working for the past week and a half, and as I’m off interstate for a fortnight soon I’d better explain why.

Tumble tree gets its information by a technique called ‘page scraping’, which gathers information by reading the HTML of a page, requesting their servers for more notes, reading the HTML again. It’s not considered to be a good thing to do, but as the Tumblr API doesn’t offer a method to get all notes for a post it was my only option. Which if you are a single person, Tumblr probably don’t mind so much, your impact would be negligable. But involving more users makes the situation far worse.

I knew it wasn’t a great way of doing things, but then found out that their Terms of Service explicitly forbid scraping, which is grounds for closing off Tumblr accounts and potential legal action:

And as this tool gives a growing number of people the ability to make literally hundreds more requests for notes than they might otherwise (not that most people would), I find myself in the position of facilitating a great deal of strain on Tumblr’s already stretched servers. So until I hear back from Tumblr / discuss reasonable limits / get permission to run this tool, it’ll have to remain offline. Some time ago Missing-e users might remember the warnings that Tumblr put up regarding that extension - and page scraping was one of the reasons listed that Tumblr didn’t like Mising-e. This tool gives people the ability to chew up a lot more of Tumblr’s resources, but I’d be willing to enforce limits on Tumble Tree to get this within reasonable amounts if it means that it can be used at all.

I don’t mean to demonise Tumblr here - if I owned a blogging service of this size and traffic, I would disallow page scraping and excessive API usage as much as needed to provide a stable site too. However, I do hope that they consider things like this on a case-by-case basis, and perhaps work towards having this kind of functionality built in natively or allowed by 3rd party tools, as the response from launching this alone has proved just how much the Tumblr public would like a visual reblog mapper and notes filtering like this. If the difficulty for Tumblr is server load (which is likely), then this would obviously push any server-intensive features down Tumblr’s list of developement priorities considerably.

I hope this tree’ll pop back online soon, even if it has to have a severely reduced note limit - so stay tuned and I’ll let people know how this pans out. Thanks for your interest and support.

Tumble tree has been down for a while

Mon, 27 Aug 2012 03:58:19 -0400

Because I completely ran out of time to sort out what I was doing before departing on a ski holiday. I’m back now, but cannot put it live again just yet - I’ll post back here once I get it running again.

Ilikemlp submitted a good idea for Firefox users

Thu, 16 Aug 2012 01:38:47 -0400

Should work well before I get around to making a greasemonkey script or an extension.

If someone using Firefox wants to use this without the bookmarks toolbar, they can use an add-on called Custom Buttons, which allows one to create a Tumble Tree toolbar button with this code:

loadURI(“javascript:(function(){document.body.appendChild(document.createElement(‘script’)).src=’http://dxinteractive.com/_public/tumbletree/tumbletree.js’;})();”)

Version 0.3 update

Thu, 16 Aug 2012 01:33:00 -0400

Hey all, small update. Raised the notes limit from 5000 to 20000, and made the tree hidden by default if you have 1000+ reblogs, at which point you can choose to display it (at your own risk!). I’ve heard a few people really just use this thing for the comments filtering, and I don’t want a slow performance unwieldy tree clogging up the browser.

I’ll be in and out of holidays the next few weeks, when I get back I’m going to focus on fixing existing bugs, maybe browser extensions and… custom colours?

As always, updates are automatic, you don’t have to do anything.

When a new version comes out, it updates automatically I'm guessing? Also thank-you for this wonderful tool. It's both fun and helpful!

Thu, 09 Aug 2012 01:17:10 -0400

Yeah it does update itself - should have mentioned that!

Version 0.2 update Filter notes by username (see pic) Speed up...

Thu, 09 Aug 2012 01:01:42 -0400

Version 0.2 update

Filter notes by username (see pic)
Speed up tree growing for large reblog counts
Sped up notes filtering for large note counts
Hides the colour mode button for posts that haven’t been featured when zoomed out
Fixed issue #3 (filter buttons wrapping on large note counts)
Fixed issue #6 (zooming out full inverts tree on large trees)

And regarding the notes limit - next update I’m planning to raise or remove the limit, and simply hide the tree if the tree can’t handle it, so you’ll still be able to sift through comments etc. That’s all for now.

Whoa this thing is taking off a bit! This is the last picture I...

Mon, 06 Aug 2012 04:53:51 -0400

Whoa this thing is taking off a bit! This is the last picture I could get before it hit the 5000 notes limit.

Anyway, quick update - I’ve had ~40 messages regarding various bugs and feature ideas in the past couple of days - I’ve added these and other features I want to the dev page.

2 frequently asked questions have been popping up:
+ why the 5000 note limit
+ how does it get the notes data?

The 5000 note limit is because this thing just isn’t optimised for high reblog counts yet. Coupled with how long it takes to load the notes from Tumblr’s servers and how the tree can sometimes bring some browsers to a crawl, I thought it’d be better to cap the amount and perhaps raise it later once it’s ready to handle the load.

As for the data loading - it’s done by page scraping *gasp* (page scraping is reading the HTML of a page to get information). The Tumblr API is decent, but they provide no way I can see to get more than 50 notes from a given post which is disappointing. Page scraping is dirty I agree, but at this point it’s the only way I have working. As such the notes load from newest to oldest, which means that showing partially loaded trees is tricky because the final note is needed to tie the tree together at the ‘trunk’. Loading just a few notes would often result in a lot of separated branches floating in the air. Regardless, I would like to make Tumble tree more robust and give it the ability to display fragments of trees like that.

I’ll make a FAQ page soon. Also, if anyone has experience with making Greasemonkey scripts / Firefox addons / Userscripts out of bookmarklets then I might like to hear from you.

I should have some bug fixes and features done in a couple of days. Glad you like what’s been done so far and thanks for the feedback!

Just tracking how the tumble tree post is going - pretty fun....

Sat, 04 Aug 2012 23:07:11 -0400

Just tracking how the tumble tree post is going - pretty fun. And as always let me know if you find any bugs, it’s early days yet.

dxinteractive: Introducing Tumble Tree! ~ Check out this thing...

Sat, 04 Aug 2012 04:21:16 -0400

dxinteractive:

Introducing Tumble Tree! ~ Check out this thing I made that lets you see how posts are reblogged across Tumblr. It works on the dashboard or on most permalink pages, and you can sproing the branches around, filter notes by comments, save the tree as a picture blah blah blah. I’ve been using and testing it for the last couple of weeks and it’s pretty handy.

Go to tumble-tree.tumblr.com to try it out and install it. I guarantee you probably won’t die!

P.S. Yes this is why I haven’t posted much in the last couple of weeks.

An example of how this works on the dashboard.

It's live!

Sat, 04 Aug 2012 03:53:54 -0400

Awesome. Hope this thing is of some use to someone. Let me know if anyone out there finds any bugs too.

http://tumble-tree.tumblr.com