Fun Size Bytes (from @Tj)

Tumblr Scheduling Bug

cleversimon:

TJ wrote a beautiful post a couple of days ago about his friend who recently passed away, and her daughter, and how complicated grief and comfort can be. You probably missed it. You should [go read it now](http://talesofbeingtj.com/post/182597176/).

Why did you miss it the first time?

talesofbeingtj:

I tried to get the linked post to publish Tuesday at 1 p.m. but it never appeared in my Dashboard, and so I’m thinking it may not have appeared in anyone else’s either.

I bet if you scroll back, waayyy back, you’ll probably see it appeared in the Dashboard as though you’d posted it the moment you saved it to the queue. This is a problem I’ve had with Tumblr *forever*, one I’ve made them aware of, and one they apparently have no intention of fixing.

But hey, at least we’ve got Tumblarity. And tag channels. And a search function (that doesn’t return audio posts). And email posting (that doesn’t work right). And an iPhone-optimized interface (that fucking blows).

Tumblr’s great for trivia, ephemera, and goofing around. As a serious tool to reach a serious audience via their Dashboards, it falls far, far short.

I finished writing the piece around 2am (give or take) and told Tumblr to schedule it for 1 p.m.

Tumblr immediately published it.

I went in and edited it, and told it to schedule for 1 p.m. (again) and it appeared on the website, but not on the Dashboard.

My guess is that there is some sort of internal “switch” in Tumblr which says “Once this has appeared on the Dashboard, never show it in the Dashboard again.”

1) Work-around: as far as I can tell, this bug happens most often when you try schedule a post using a time without a day.

For example, if I finish this at 1:30pm and schedule it for 5:30 pm, it will (sometimes) trigger the bug. If I say “Thursday, 5:30 p.m.” then it is less likely to trigger the bug.

2) “Scheduling” seems to be buggier than “Queue-ing”. Although I have occasionally seem some posts in the Queue which say they are “Publishing now…” but get “stuck”. At that point I just re-enter it and post it as a new post, because the same “won’t show up on Dashboard” bug occurs.

3) Also, if you select anything other than “Publish Now” under “Publishing Options” make sure that the “Action Button” (under the textarea where you type the body of the message, where it usually says Post/ReBlog post/etc) changes accordingly.

If you are scheduling for a specific time, it should say “Schedule Post”.

If you are adding it to the queue, it should say “Queue Post”.

If it doesn’t, try clicking the “Publishing options” drop-down again until it does.