Room 208

Elaborate Burn

Posts from #followeroutreach

@sunbinamra writes:

Hi! First off, thank you so much for the post about changing type of Tumblr post - I’ve managed to turn a couple of posts from text to photo. However, I’m a complete novice when it comes to codes, hacks, etc. and in both cases I end up with a blank ghost image at the beginning that I can’t seem to get rid of. Do you have any idea what might be causing this? Thanks again!

I suspect that since the post type conversion doesn’t have a value for the image field, Tumblr inserts a reference to a nonexistent image instead. (This isn’t your fault; it’s just a quirk of how the data is stored on the server.) Ordinarily, you’d be able to delete it using the dashboard, but the button to do so only appears when you hover over the image. Since the image doesn’t actually exist, it’s displayed with a height of zero pixels. Can’t really hover over that.

What you can do, though, is simulate a click on the delete button. To do this, open up the broken post’s edit page, and paste the following in the developer console:

$('.remove-button').first().click();

If you haven’t added any other images yet, the standard Upload photos and Add photo from web options should appear inside the edit form, indicating that Tumblr thinks there are no longer any images attached to the post. In either case, save once you’ve changed the images to your liking, and you should be on your merry way.

An anonymous correspondent writes:

I’m having issues with your most recent tutorial on changing post types because there never seems to be a request made to svc/post/update, even though I am recording requests and responses when saving the post and have tried many times. Any ideas? It’s a text post. Thanks for your time.

I’m not sure what might be causing this, so here’s one random guess – have you tried making a dummy change to the post before saving? If there are no changes, the dashboard code may detect that nothing’s changed and not bother making a request.

An anonymous correspondent writes:

I am begging you to do a screenshot tutorial of how to change the type of your post with the web inspector. I get so close and I don’t know why it’s not working

Ask and ye shall receive: I’ve updated the guide with some screenshots from Chrome as a visual reference. If you still run into trouble, some of the required post fields, as covered in the original version of the tutorial, may be empty. Try rearranging the JSON fields if necessary, and when all else fails, look at the contents of the AJAX response object for error messages.

@adamrobezzoli writes:

I saw your post (“Changing the type of an existing Tumblr post”)—that’s a great tip. Thanks for sharing! Do you know if something like this might be possible for changing the author of a post in a group tumblr?

Glad to help!

As far as I’m aware, there’s no way to do this. Allowing author changes incautiously could cause real problems – a malicious user could make someone else the author of an unflattering post, or take authorship of a good one. It’s also possible that Tumblr’s code assumes that the currently logged-in user is the one posting in enough places to make implementing author changes a headache. Arguably, if you’re a blog admin, you should still have the power to change authorship among the members of that blog, but until Tumblr explicitly announces such a feature, don’t hold your breath.

Spoilers for the last Colbert Report

The selection of Neutral Milk Hotel’s contradictory “Holland, 1945” for the end credits of the final episode – sonically upbeat, yet lyrically a grim contention with death – makes a lot of sense in this light.

Just sayin’.

Meanwhile, Paul Krugman, who was part of the massive studio chorus singing “We’ll Meet Again” along with Mr. Colbert, reveals that there really was a conspiracy all along, bwahahaha!

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