Dan Leveille

Title Option on Tumblr Photo Posts

To: Tumblr Support
From: Dan Leveille
Date:  April 23, 2010 at 4:26am

Hello, I run a Tumblr news blog at blog.equalitopia.com. Because of the way Tumblr works, we use photo posts instead of text posts to write news articles, that way we can easily use an image and it will show up on users’ dashboards.

I’m requesting that an optional “Title” be added to Photo posts.

Since titles of photo posts are automatically generated based on the description, they’re usually inaccurate, cut off, and end with “…”.

For example, in this post, the title is:

Jane Lynch to receive Outfest award The gay… - Equalitopia Blog

how bad does that look? It should be:

Jane Lynch to receive Outfest award - Equalitopia Blog

This is bad for many reasons:

• In search engines results, these inaccurate titles show up. A “Title” field would more accurately include results in search engines.
• When submitting our posts to sites like Digg, Reddit, Facebook, or any other sites, these titles show up.
• Users cannot effectively use plugins and scripts that use the <title> tag, for example, the new Facebook “Like” buttons.

This is my major issue with Tumblr, and one of the few reasons I would ever consider switching to a more traditional blogging service.