Don’t work hard, work smart!
Though I admit I’m working on something pretty ----- dumb…
“The Prissy Pet Project”–does that ring a bell? Yeah, I know it’s been a while since I rapped at ya about it, so I forgive you if you have no clue what I’m jabbering on about. But fear not! I’ll bring mostly up to speed.
In long, you can read all about it here.
In short–which is the version you were really hoping for–it’s my long-lived and ultimately unsuccessful attempt at becoming an online kimchi broker, but has so far only really ended with me having a fierce hatred for Amazon and capitalism, along with a totally useless Tumblr blog with about 4k followers.
Originally, that “totally useless” blog with a paltry 4,000 followers was supposed to act as the advertising arm of my Amazon store front, kimchiandketo.com, and all the profits were going to be made by getting a small cut of any Amazon sale made by clicking on any of my advertised products.
But thanks to the greedy forces of capitalism, Amazon decided to make that “small cut” even smaller, rendering my business model completely unprofitable. Hence, rendering my (by far) more successful blog as useless as a bull’s teat.
I have to admit, though…it was kinda nice being sorta popular in at least one part of the interwebs. And part of what made kimchi-and-keto so popular was the use of an automated re-blogging widget called Queue+. Basically it would let me reblog other blogs’ posts en masse, randomly, and on a regular schedule.
Of course, the more you post, the more exposure you get, the more followers you gain, and the bigger you ego-concerning-completely-asinine-and-inutile-things gets. Now back in August 2020, I had just about ran plumb out of what was once a rather generous supply of queued posts. Instead of finding new content to refill my queue, I instead found it much easier to reblog all the posts of the one blog I knew would be full of suitable content: mine.1My Tumblr blog, not this blog you’re reading right now. Recycling all my posts was mildly tedious process, but at the end of the day I had quite a few posts ready to be fired off one at a time, at the frequency of my choosing:
At the time, I made a handy little calculation of when my now-overflowing well of posts would run dry, based on various posting frequencies:
| Frequency: | Posts per Day: | # of Days: | Burndown Date: | |
| 30 min | 48 | 233.5 | March 24, 2021 | |
| 15 min | 96 | 117 | November 28, 2020 | |
| 10 min | 144 | 78 | October 20, 2020 | |
| 6 min | 240 | 47 | September 19, 2020 |
Wanting to make this as passive as possible for as long as possible, I opted to stretch things out and set the interval at every 30 minutes. At the time, March 24, 2021, seemed like forever and a day away. But as you know, that date has come and went, and sure enough, the number of posts in my queue drained to zero.
Given that, really, all this is pretty pointless, I never found the time to try to load my queue back up, because, you know, priorities and all. Yet, it still bothered me that I was the owner of a fruitless blog, just gathering dust and Tumblr-weeds.2In all transparency, this was originally an unintended pun.
This simmering & unjustifiable anxiety finally got the best of me yesterday, when I got so sick and tired of my empty queue constantly reminding me of what a failure that the whole Prissy Pet Project has been that I finally decided to do something about it.
And this time, I was dead set on being popular forever. Or at least as long as Tumblr is around. Though that probably won’t be too much longer now.
Are you ready for some asinine details? Okay, here you go…
“Bottleneck.” That is the word of the day. What process really takes up most of the time for a given task? What is disproportionately slowing things down?
You remember how I described the process of adding posts to a Queue+ queue as “mildly tedious”? Well, in theory it should be instantaneous compared to hand-picking and adding posts one at a time. And by that standard it really is. But let me walk you through the process, and I’ll point out where, in practice, bottlenecks happen–and what to do about them.
The process itself is fairly simple. Just add ‘/archive’ to the URL of any Tumblr blog and you’ll get something that looks like this, which is what happens when you type ‘https://kimchi-and-keto.tumblr.com/archive’ into your browser:
So this is just a thumbnail gallery of all the posts on a particular Tumblr blog, sorted by Month/Year. Now in the pic above, what you don’t see is the additional options a Queue+ Chrome plugin will give you at the top. In fact, I learned that this particular plugin got banned from the Chrome App store (LOL?), and the only reason I can use it is because I still had it on my 10 year old PC, and it still functioned–much to my delight.
Well, if you have that plugin, you can essentially “Select All” posts with one click, and then add them to your Queue+ queue with another two quick clicks. But…
But the problem is that only add the ones that have had their thumbnails loaded, so the bottleneck then becomes “How fast can your old computer load as many thumbnails as possible?”
I know, I know, it sounds so ----- stupid. And it is. But that’s the burden I gotta bear if I want to stay popular on Tumblr for no good reason.
As it turns out, since you have to either scroll down or use the Page Down key to get new thumbnails to load, this takes forever, at least when you’re hoping to re-add all 11k+ of your posts.
Now, as with most things with me, I 1) don’t accept the status quo, and 2) usually let things get out of hand. Let’s see if I managed to stay true to form?
The first thing I realized was that I could speed things up by making those thumbnails as small as reasonably possible. How did I do this, you ask? By just zooming my browser out to ~10%! And I can’t believe it, but this actually worked:
Here’s a time-lapsed gif of loading one month’s worth of my posts (48 x ~30 = 1440), which represents about a minute or 2 in real time:
Ok, but what about the tedious task of sitting there and Page-Downing endlessly? Well I got you covered there too! I just used a little trick I learned by watching MacGyver growing up.
You see that candle in one of the pictures above? Well here’s what is really going on with it:
This is what I call the ol’ “Brick on the gas pedal” trick. That’s right: I took a little wood block I had lying around, put it on my Page Down key, then balanced a candle on it, and voila! I could Page Down without lifting (or, technically, “lowering”) a finger!
Given that I my poor computer could only load a limited number of thumbnails before choking, I had to break my task down by month. I had 14 of these, since the blog had been active from January 2020 up until it ran out of gas at the end of March 2021. This still would take 5-10 minutes per month, but towards the end I just said “Screw it!” and loaded all of February and January 2020 and did that in once shot (I was working backwards in time, if you were wondering).
This put me up to ~24k posts:
At 24k sweet, sweet posts, that should last me upwards of 500 days, or about a year and a half. Nice, but…could I do better?
It was at this point in time that I got another idea…Once I had a batch of post thumbnails loaded–the bottleneck, remember?–why couldn’t I just Select All and Add To Queue+ multiple times while I was already there?
The last batch I had loaded up consisted of about 3900 posts, so I invested another half hour and repeated this process ~10x (remember, my computer is slow–it probably would have gone faster on a more fancy computer).
So by the end of the day yesterday, what did I have to show for my hard work?
That’s right, 57,167 posts, ready to be fired off, 48 per day. If you do the math, that means I shouldn’t have to touch things for about 3 years and 3 months!
I should be happy, right? I should just leave it there, right?
Well, I actually did…but just for the evening though!
If we’re going to automate things, then let’s do it right and make the dang thing run until my 3-year-old graduates from high school at least!
So guess what I did with my spare time today? Yup, in between tasks, I loaded up my posts 2 months at a time, and then reposted them 10 times per batch!
“What do you have to show for it?”, you are most definitely wondering. Well here’s your answer:
269,920 Posts.
5623.3333333 Days
15.40639269406392 Years
It’s not quite forever forever–but it’s close!
The point of the story is: 1) why half-ass things when you can full-ass things? And 2) here’s to all those haters that said that my hours upon hours of watching MacGyver would never pay off. Well, guess which one of us is the most popular girl on Tumblr now, huh?
HUH?!?
Content created on: 16 July 2021 (Friday)
Footnotes & References:
Leave a Reply