Recently active topics in Tumblr

I got a reply from David (Karp) for a comment I left on the main Tumblr v4 regarding this, and he says RSS is coming in v4. I just thought I'd put the discussion here to see how many others share my interest.

As a side note I really think the lack of RSS really is why I miss so many posts. I really can't keep the dashboard open at all times, mainly because paging is simply a flawed design and I'm pretty sure Feed readers are how most tech people read their, well, feeds.

Here's to hoping.

I really think it would be cool if there was a way to make the audio posts into an iTunes compatible Podcast feed. Then it would automatically take any audio posts and create an iTunes Podcast feed out of them. This could then be submitted to iTunes as a Podcast which people could download and use on their iPods.

There would have to be proper "enclosure" support, as well as tweaking the XML to be compliant to iTune's standard.

Come to think of it, why can't you download the audio files that are uploaded to an audio post?

It would be great if Tumblr offered an option to import RSS feeds as video or audio posts. The media enclosure would become a flash video / audio post and the item description would become the caption.

Would be cool to support Atom, MetaWeblog, or BloggerAPI posting formats... this comes up because many on flickr would like to use their "blogthis" function to submit to tumblr, but one of these formats would be needed, or explicit addition by flickr (which has been requested but no action yet).

Because Tumblr provides its JSON read output as a Javascript variable (complete with a semicolon at the end) it won't work out of the box with the json-php library--and possibly other json libraries. My quick fix was to use str_replace to remove the non array pieces:

$json = new Services_JSON();

$input=file_get_contents('http://thor.tumblr.com/api/read/json', 1000000);
$input=str_replace('var tumblr_api_read = ','',$input);
$input=str_replace(';','',$input);

$value = $json->decode($input);

I don't code much so perhaps there's a better way to go about this. But this hack is working for me just fine.