In a couple of days, Filter By Type will be removed from your extension list, and XIM server will be shut down on 5th of October.
The reasons are listed below, read mored. I apologize if you are on mobile.
Filter By Type
This feature depended on a server side functionality that Tumblr used to provide. With that server side functionality, and only with it, it could filter and show the posts in a speedy way. Without it, I would have to check each post by type, and load more, and it would take a long, long time (ie: 5-10 minutes in some cases) to load 5-10 posts.
I’ve mailed Tumblr about this twice, and they said they would be passing my message to the Engineering team, but I’ve never heard from them after that. I guess they’ve removed that feature, and it’s not going to make a comeback, which makes Filter By Type useless (and, well, to be honest, bad publicity, since most people do not know it’s not working because of the Tumblr change, and think it’s just broken).
XIM
I’ve written about XIM before, stating that it costs a lot of money for me, and only 4-6% of the XKit users use it (~1,500 people). A survey showed around 12% of the people who participated in the survey using it (~1,200 people). Since Survey was filled out by only 10,000 compared to 250,000+ XKit users, and the user base numbers are nearly the same, I’m guessing I was right about that.
The thing is, in case you missed, I pay for two servers every month: XKit and XIM. XKit servers let you install and update XKit, download extensions, receive news, send bug reports, host xkit.info and theme files of this blog and more. XIM servers are used for XIM only.
And XIM servers cost around 12 times more than XKit servers. Nearly all the donations I receive go directly to XIM servers. I don’t think that is fair to me or people who donate to me for non-XIM extensions.
I was going to shut down XIM before today actually, since today is the renewal date of it. There was an interruption to the service last night, when my credit card was rejected, and they’ve shut down the server. I’ve decided it would be terrible to just leave it shut down, without a warning, so I’ve managed to renew for it for another month, hence the October 5th shutdown date. It was made possible by the donations I’ve received after my last post about XIM (this one)
Again, as I’ve said on that post, I’m not shutting down XIM because it’s “not profitable enough” (nothing in XKit is), I’m shutting it down because it is bankrupting me.
I apologize for the removal of these two extensions, but there is nothing I can do about either one anymore. Hope you understand.
Thank you for reading, and thank you for your understanding.