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Comment by hamburglar | Hacker News Reader

Well, just about everything about Tumblr seems crufty, unusable, and poorly thought out to me, so I guess having it murdered by a Yahoo acquisition wouldn't be all bad.

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Care to elaborate? I love Tumblr's approach (though not necessarily the content it attracts) to blogging.

I'm assuming that hamburglar is talking about the backend that Tumblr relies on, and it's not pretty. They had big troubles with stability at one point last year, including a typo in VIM on a production server that spat out all of their API keys to every user.

https://gist.github.com/zachinglis/29c5c5970d1f3313abd1/raw/...

I've seen that leaked PHP code before... does anyone have a link to the full story to go with it? Was it really only last year?

The code is scary in so many ways. I assumed it was from Tumblr's early days and they long since fixed it up.

I'm not sure if there is any official story, but it is clearly somebody messing up with `vim` on the production servers. They've tried to go into insert mode, failed, and not realised their mistake until after they've written the file. If I remember correctly, this output was the response to every tumblr request for about 15 minutes before anybody noticed and fixed it.

    i?php

I hate Tumblr. Most Tumblr blogs are an eyesore (in the same way the old MySpace profiles were). I avoid the site whenever possible.

Accessing Tumblr sites directly is for "legacy support". A very high percentage of Tumblr impressions are through the Dashboard where all style/themes are removed from the content.

So I've heard. It's perverse. All the styling and theming is atrocious, but good news: on this blogging platform, nobody actually looks at the public facing pages! Everything looks great (if you think completely unstyled text and images and no externally-hosted content == "great") so long as you log in to a view only you can see.

This doesn't make any sense! if you want to view tumblr without the themes use the /archive feature

Odd, that sounds like an RSS reader but one integrated directly into the way tumblr does syndication.

Why would the tumblr audience be heavy RSS (alike) users but also be one of the reasons that Google is abandoning RSS readers?

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