staff:

Our friend Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library TV just made Tumblr his new home! Check out the sick custom theme by Jacob.

Gary’s streaming live on his blog, so go check him out if you don’t know what he’s about.

There are dozens of Tumblr meetups coming up all over the world.

Feb 26: Adelaide, Australia
Feb 26: Stockholm
Feb 27: Marietta, Georgia
Feb 27: London
Mar 5: San Juan, Puerto Rico
Mar 5: Chicago
Mar 6: Sydney
Mar 6: Chile
Mar 6: Las Vegas
Mar 6: Kansas City, Missouri
Mar 7:…

staff:

Clark went on a harrowing bulldog walk last weekend that lasted nearly 30 minutes and spanned fifteen blocks!

Some moments deserve more than one angle. That’s why we’re ecstatic to give Photosets a huge upgrade today, giving you new levels of control to tell your stories the way you want to.

1) Photoset photos now open in all their high-res glory on the Dashboard and on your blog.

2) You can now pick a layout for your photos to tell the right story.

3) Tumblr Themes can now make Photosets look and work any way you please with a host of new theme variables:

{block:Photoset}
    <!-- Number of photos -->
    {PhotoCount}
    
    <!-- Integer representation of the layout -->
    {PhotosetLayout}
    
    <!-- JS array of the Photoset column counts -->
    {JSPhotosetLayout}
    
    <!-- Each of the Photoset photos -->
    {block:Photos}
        {PhotoURL-500}
        
        {block:HighRes}
            {PhotoURL-HighRes}
        {/block:HighRes}
        
        {Caption}
        
        {block:Exif} ... {/block:Exif}
    {/block:Photos}
{/block:Photoset}

Enjoy!

staff:

Introducing: Submissions

There’s an interesting genre of blog that is more about the community than the author.

At some point you’ve probably seen Eat Sleep Draw, This is why you’re fat, or Cute Overload.

The author starts posting about a topic they care about, the readers start contributing, and before you know it, the author has become a curator.

Tumblr has always been uniquely suited for this type of blog.  In fact, 6 of them have gone from Tumblr blog to book deal in the last year.

So today we’re very excited to release Submissions, a feature to streamline community-driven blogs.  You can enable it from your blog’s Customize screen to let your readers submit posts via web.

staff:

This week we launched the 6th iteration of the Tumblr Dashboard. And as you can probably tell, it makes room for a whole bunch of new things we’re getting ready to launch.

The first are some major upgrades to Messages (currently Questions and Submissions) that are available today:

Unified Inbox. The new Inbox saves you the trouble of checking for new Messages across all of your blogs. Additionally, the Inbox icon will show an unread count for any Messages that any of your blogs receive! You can disable the Inbox on your Preferences page.

Delete All Messages. Once you’ve answered or approved all of the posts you care about, you can now delete the rest with just two clicks.

Private Answers. When someone asks a Question that you’d like to respond to but you’d rather it not appear on your blog, you can now deliver a private answer directly to the sender.

Note: These features won’t appear unless you have Questions or Submissions enabled on at least one of your blogs.

staff:

Your blogs now come with an optimized iPhone layout!

And a damn nice looking one at that.

This should be a huge improvement when browsing Tumblr blogs from the iPhone — and we’re building similar views for BlackBerry’s, Android, and more. Stay tuned.

If your theme already looks great on mobile devices, you can disable this feature by unchecking Customize → Advanced → Use optimized layout on mobile devices.

staff:

Every now and again we find some Tumblr fan art that’s too cool not to share. We’ve been cataloging them on weheart.tumblr.com and, in honor of the new Submission feature, are taking your submissions!

staff:

Introducing: Photosets

If a picture is worth a thousand words, photosets are the future of books.  Enjoy!

New theme tags are available in the Theme Docs for customization.

staff:

Now Live: The Tumblr Spotlight

We’re always amazed by the breadth and creativity we find on Tumblr, and we’re always looking for better ways for you to showcase your talents and discover other interesting blogs. With the new Spotlight, we’ve set aside a special place to highlight a few of these blogs that truly inspire us.

With your help, we’ve added hundreds to this Spotlight over the last few weeks and we’ll be adding many more, along with new categories and new languages. If you know of a great blog that we’ve missed or have a category you’d like to see, please send it to editors@tumblr.com.

It’s also much easier to find the People You Know tool where you can look up your friends on Tumblr. Note: We’ve moved the option to disable email lookups to your Preferences page.

ukinusa:

From the Detroit Auto Show: Discussing Ford’s investment in the UK

Robert Chatterton Dickson, British Consul General covering the Midwestern United States, takes a moment between meetings at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit to discuss Ford Motor Company’s extensive work in the United Kingdom. Ford has manufactured vehicles in the UK for more than 100 years and is now the UK’s single largest foreign investor. The company’s latest technology is on display at the auto show in Detroit.

Learn more about the work of the British Consulate-General in Chicago. Follow @UKinChicago on Twitter and on Facebook.