Things Tumblr Does For You

A while ago I added search through Swiftype to my tumblr. It’s really quite effective, especially considering your alternative is the funtionally useless default tumblr search. It has never worked for me on other people’s sites, and on my own, it returned no results when I searched for “the”.

Yeah, you should probably get Swiftype.File “site search” as something Tumblr doesn’t do for you. So sign up for a free account on Swiftype, grab the code representing the search bar, and look through the HTML for your theme for “search” and try to replace that with the Swiftype stuff.

Anyway, they recently sent out an e-mail with a bunch of new stuff they added. One of those things was support for a sitemap, which lists all the pages of your site and some metadata about them. So I looked into it a little and discovered that yourtumblrname.tumblr.com/sitemap.xml is automatically generated for you. sitemap-pages.xml lists the things you’ve added via Tumblr’s Pages, and sitemap1.xml lists all the posts you’ve ever made and the last time they were modified.

Next discovery I made was yourtumblrname.tumblr.com/robots.txt, which tells polite search engines where to find your sitemap and what parts of your domain to exclude. Wikipedia’s got a little page about it. If you go to that file, you’ll see that it asks web crawlers not to look at your private posts - they don’t have to do that, though. By sheer brute force they could easily discover all your private posts, as could anyone else willing to try the various random numbers inserted in the url of a private post.

The one issue I have with this stuff is that I don’t know how you could modify them. Still, it’s really nice to have this stuff done for you already. You’d never need to know this stuff exists, no matter how much you use Tumblr, and that’s a good choice on their part.