This may be a temporary situation, but I wanted to raise it so that I could share it with folks like Red Sweater and others who may work with 3rd party Tumblr editing software.
It appears that Tumblr is doing some very aggressive caching of posted content, which has resulted in changes not being immediately visible.
A Statistically Insignificant Sample Set of One
This may be a fluke or a temporary situation, so I’d avoid any “sky is falling” prognostication about this, but I did some repeated testing of my own Tumblrs this morning (2010-12-15) and at least at the present time, it appears true. At least right now. At least for me.
What happened was this: I sent a message to Tumblr using MarsEdit and made a few formatting mistakes that I wanted to clean up. I edited the message in MarsEdit, saw the Growl notification that my edits had been successfully submitted to Tumblr, but when I viewed the page online, the edits were not there.
At first I thought perhaps the Tumblr API had changed and MarsEdit was falsely reporting that it had been correctly updated when it hadn’t been, but when I went to edit the post in Tumblr’s built-in editor, I saw that my edits were already there.
I saved it, and viewed the final page again… which was still showing me an older version. I deleted my browser cache (command+option+E in Safari) and reloaded the page… still showing me the older version. I launched Opera (which had never opened the page before) and it too showed me the outdated text.
A minute or two later, everything seemed to finally update, but the process repeated when I made another test a moment later.
As I said, this might just be a temporary situation, but if you make an edit and it does not immediately appear, check the post in Tumblr’s built-in editor and see if the change is visible, and give it a minute or two to appear.
I’d estimate that 99.99% of the posts made on Tumblr are never edited after their initial publication, so this probably won’t effect too many people, but if you’re among the few (or if you support some software which posts to Tumblr), I thought you’d want to know.
