Tumblr notes - accessing and using all the notes on a post

[drwhofreak]

Hi there

I'm trying to do some visualisation of the path of tumblr posts through the site, using directed network graphs (blogs are the nodes, 'reblogged from' shows the direction etc.)

I can do this okay by manually copying and pasting notes and using find and replace to get the text into the right format for use in graphing programs like gephi, however this manual copying and psting doesn't cut it when it comes to posts with thousands of notes, let alone tens of thousands.

I need to know a way of getting all the notes automatically. Is there a way (besides page scraping... which i don't really know how to do anyway)?

It would also be of interest to know how i could get timestamp data from notes - the number order is sufficent to give a timeline (i want to arrange the graphs in chronological order), but i'd rather have something more specific to work with.
 i hope this is making some kind of sense (i feel like a total noob writing this)

ideally i am aiming to create a tool on the web that allows you to input the url of a post, and then automatically generates the network graph for that post. (I'll probably use something like sigmajs do do this on the web). whether this is actually possible i'm not sure, but i'm trying to see how far I can get, any pointers will be useful!

Thanks :)

[HT154]

I actually just encountered a finished project that does exactly what you described. Tumble Tree does it very well. You may want to look into how they do it for ideas. The tumblr API call for getting info on a single post would be a good place to look. See here. Particularly, the "notes_info" parameter will be of interest to you.

[drwhofreak]

oh, thanks for the link! that does do pretty much everything i wanted to do, and probably does it a lot better than i would have done. they had to use page scraping for theirs, which makes me think that there's no other way, but maybe i'll focus more on that aspect. thanks also for the api call info - i'll look into ways of using it

[Felix Bonkoski]

AFAIK, there is no way to get more than the maximum of 50 notes returned with the call:

api.tumblr.com/v2/blog/{base-hostname}/posts?notes_info=true

Notes returned from the API *do* come with a timestamp for each Note.

They *do not* come with the meta information about Reblogs, eg:

"SomeUser27 Reblogged this from AnotherUser43"

It's odd -- to get both pieces of information (the timestamp, as well as the "Reblogged from") you would have to combine page scraping with the API.

Also of note, is that the API's Notes don't include when a post is Featured in a #Tag, eg  "This post was Featured in #Artists on Tumblr"

I'd love to be corrected about this, or learn about some secret undocumented API features, but I think this is the state of things.

Felix

--

Felix Bonkoski

[HT154]

I started a thread the other day about the lack of metadata returned by notes_info, but I haven't heard anything back. Seems weird that we get some data in the API only and some from scraping only.