Tumblr Dashboard Page URL Trick
EDIT: For some reason years after I made this post people keep reblogging it, and I don’t know why, because this post was completely wrong. I’m an idiot. I’m pretty sure what actually happened was that Tumblr briefly turned off the distinct URLs for the pages, and then later turned it back on, and my trying this “trick” happened to coincide with their turning it back on and I thought I had developed a workaround to an issue that in fact no longer existed. Even if I’m wrong about having been wrong and this trick did serve a function at the time, it certainly doesn’t now, because pages on the dashboard do have distinct URLs anyway. So the information in this post is almost certainly completely incorrect, and even if it was correct it’s seriously out of date. Why do people keep reblogging this!? (I mean, not that it’s getting lots of reblogs; I’m just astonished that it’s getting any reblogs at all. Should I just turn reblogs off? Maybe I should do that.)
So, okay, I don’t know how many other people are bothered by this, but the one thing I really hated about the new Tumblr dashboard was that when I paged backward through older posts on the dashboard there were no distinct URLs for the pages anymore. It used to be that each page beyond the first page of posts had its own URL, of the form “http://www.tumblr.com/dashboard/[page number]/[eighteen-digit number corresponding to the last(?) post on the page]”—for example, “https://www.tumblr.com/dashboard/2/621951744648380416”. Now, though, URLs like that no longer work like they used to, and when I page back through the dashboard the URL in the address bar doesn’t change from just “http://www.tumblr.com/dashboard”.
Why would that matter? Well, it mattered to me because I often looked through my dashboard in binges, sometimes looking through days’ worth of posts at a time—and usually not all in one sitting. So it was nice to have a way to pick up where I left off, a URL I could copy down to “bookmark” my place in the dashboard archive, so to speak. Now I couldn’t do that anymore. Just leaving the page open in the browser wasn’t really a good solution, because what if my computer reboots for a Windows update, or the browser crashes because I have way too many tabs open (I always have way too many tabs open)?
But.
In case anyone else has experienced the same disappointment with Tumblr’s new dashboard, I am excited to announce that I just accidentally stumbled across a solution. There are permanent URLs for dashboard pages after all! They just don’t show up in your browser address bar automatically, and you have to use a bit of a workaround to get them. I am almost certainly not the first person to find this; it has probably already been explained elsewhere by someone else. But I hadn’t seen it before, so I figured I may as well share it in case anyone else is interested. (And... somehow runs across this post despite my extremely low follower count.)
Instead of “http://www.tumblr.com/dashboard/[page number]/[eighteen-digit number”, the page URL now takes the form “https://www.tumblr.com/dashboard?max_post_id=[eighteen-digit-number]”. For example, “https://www.tumblr.com/dashboard?max_post_id=624863322570948608″.
So how to get that eighteen-digit number? Well, it would make sense that you could just copy the ID of the last post on the page (which you can easily find by looking at the URL of that post)—heck, it even says “max_post_id” in that URL, right? Somewhat mysteriously, however, that “max_post_id” field does not correspond to the ID of any post on the page. Still, there’s an easy way to get it, and that’s the way I happened across it—and I hasten to say that this is almost certainly not the only way to get the URL, and probably not even the best way, but it is a way that works, or at least it worked for me: Right-click on any image on the page, and select “View Image”. Then click “back” and you’re back on the Tumblr page you were just on, but this time with the full URL in the address bar. (Note: I did this in Firefox; it has not been tested on other browsers.) Moreover, if you now click through the “Back” button you’ll get the full URL for each page without having to go through this again.
In fact, rather oddly, Tumblr now seems to “remember” that I’m seeing the full URLs, and is giving me the full URLs of dashboard pages even when I open Tumblr in another tab, or even if I create a private browsing session and log into Tumblr again. Hm. That’s... odd. I guess maybe I’ll find out later whether this persists through reboots or cache-clearing and whether it ends up causing any problems; I just discovered this way of getting URLs for dashboard pages and haven’t really done much experimentation with it. So... use at your own risk, but I for one am just happy there does seem to be a way to get URLs for dashboard pages in the new Tumblr dashboard after all.