Tumblr Change

I’m somewhat disappointed to notice this month that Tumblr  has changed. I’ve used it first as an experiment in microblogging and then because it had a feature that was very useful — posting by email. That feature just disappeared, and I’ve confirmed through their support that it has been discontinued. (If you care about that, write support and let them know; they said they’re collecting feedback.)

Post by email was an attractive feature because I often receive announcements that I want to pass along. In my case, I primarily want to give them to the students in our MFA program in creative writing, but emailing all of the students each time is a pain. I might be able to set up an email nickname with all their addresses, but maintaining this list would become a burden. I could set up a mailing list. But then I worry that students won’t check their email or will ignore these messages that come in with all their other ones.

So instead, I set up an announcement discussion in our Program Lounge in Canvas (this is like a course, but everyone is in it as long as they are in the program). I could copy and paste into that, but an easier solution was to have the Tumblr blog, which I could post to by email. The discussion in Canvas could then read the blog’s RSS feed, so all my announcements would go into this course. Or students can just follow the Tumblr, if they prefer.

Now that I can’t email posts to Tumblr, I’m looking for another solution. One workaround, of course, is just to copy and paste into the blog, but this involves a few more steps than I’d like and isn’t much more efficient than just copying and pasting directly into Canvas.

Another workaround is to read the email messages on my iPad. There I can “select all” and then share to the Tumblr app. I tried this, and it might be a good solution as long as I remember to do email on my iOS device (I assume Android would be similar). It involves a couple more steps than emailing the post to my blog, but maybe a few less than copy and paste, since I can keep the app logged into Tumblr. I will probably gravitate to either copy and paste on my computer or sharing through the app on the iPad or a combination. And if none of those work, I may go back to the old-fashioned email list.