bktandem

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RIP, power-pop legend Dwight Twilley…

Dwight Twilley, ‘I’m on Fire’ and ‘Girls’ Singer-Songwriter, Dies at 72

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Good morning, Phillies fans! It’s officially the start of Red October!

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StreamBuilder: our open-source framework for powering your dashboard.

Today, we’re abnormally jazzed to announce that we’re open-sourcing the custom framework we built to power your dashboard on Tumblr. We call it StreamBuilder, and we’ve been using it for many years.

First things first. What is open-sourcing? Open sourcing is a decentralized software development model that encourages open collaboration. In more accessible language, it is any program whose source code is made available for use or modification as users or other developers see fit.

What, then, is StreamBuilder? Well, every time you hit your Following feed, or For You, or search results, a blog’s posts, a list of tagged posts, or even check out blog recommendations, you’re using this framework under the hood. If you want to dive into the code, check it out here on GitHub!

StreamBuilder has a lot going on. The primary architecture centers around “streams” of content: whether posts from a blog, a list of blogs you’re following, posts using a specific tag, or posts relating to a search. These are separate kinds of streams, which can be mixed together, filtered based on certain criteria, ranked for relevancy or engagement likelihood, and more.

On your Tumblr dashboard today you can see how there are posts from blogs you follow, mixed with posts from tags you follow, mixed with blog recommendations. Each of those is a separate stream, with its own logic, but sharing this same framework. We inject those recommendations at certain intervals, filter posts based on who you’re blocking, and rank the posts for relevancy if you have “Best stuff first” enabled. Those are all examples of the functionality StreamBuilder affords for us.

So, what’s included in the box?

The full framework library of code that we use today, on Tumblr, to power almost every feed of content you see on the platform.

A YAML syntax for composing streams of content, and how to filter, inject, and rank them.

Abstractions for programmatically composing, filtering, ranking, injecting, and debugging streams.

Abstractions for composing streams together—such as with carousels, for streams-within-streams.

An abstraction for cursor-based pagination for complex stream templates.

Unit tests covering the public interface for the library and most of the underlying code.

What’s still to come

Documentation. We have a lot to migrate from our own internal tools and put in here!

More example stream templates and example implementations of different common streams.

If you have questions, please check out the code and file an issue there.

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Really hope it does federate within a few months of launch and that most Mastodon instances don’t block Meta right out of the gate. Sadly, many smaller instances and some larger ones have already pledged to defederate from Meta’s servers.

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“Fourth of July, Brooklyn’s on fire!”

Happy #4thOfJuly!

#NicoleAtkins

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Trying to get U.S. music listeners to stop putting a racist at No. 1 for weeks and to listen to actual good music like Brit star Jessie Ware’s new album That! Feels Good! More specifically, the album’s third single, “Begin Again,” which is an absolute banger and ass-shaker. It is officially my Summer Jam of 2023 and frontrunner for my song of the year.

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These guys are from near Trenton, NJ. I’ve followed one of them for a few years after stumbling onto him on Instagram. He had been in a couple of prog-ish bands, but now he is in this art-pop (?) project called Bad News for Birds. They just released this debut single and video for “Good Morning” today.

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Loving the new album from @workdrugs. Here is the title track.

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Whenever a baseball player hits a home run or does something special on their birthday, the great Sarah Langs tweets "Birthdays are important!"

Well, TODAY is Sarah's birthday (and one month until Lou Gehrig's Day) and you can honor Sarah and her fight against ALS by making a donation to Project ALS. Click link for details.

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Brilliant!

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This is fantastic news!

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Whoa! XTC’s Andy Partridge has a new project called The 3 Clubmen with Jen Olive and Stu Rowe, and they’ve released a single called “Aviatrix”

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20 years ago today, I witnessed my first MLB no-hitter courtesy of Kevin Millwood, who blanked the Giants 1-0 on a Sunday afternoon at Veterans Stadium. The Phillies later documented Millwood’s Masterpiece in this DVD…

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It’s official! Murray Gold is returning as Doctor Who composer!

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“It’s April 21st

And everybody knows

Today is Earth Day

Merry Christmas

Happy birthday

To whoever’s being born”

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ActivityPub is where it's at, kids!