X-Kit: Your Tumblr Lifesaver
By
Mitali Bellamkonda
So, you’ve created a tumblr and you’ve been posting, liking, reblogging and generally lurking because you haven’t quite gotten the hang of it yet. Well, let me introduce you to the one thing that is going to save you a lot of hassle, pain and confusion in the future, X-kit.
X-kit is an extension for tumblr created by the x-kit guy who lives in Turkey. Tumblr loves him as is apparent in this article by The Daily Dot.
What does it do?
Have you ever gone through tumblr and thought to yourself, “geeze, I wish there was an easier way to add tags after you’ve accidentally reblogged a post without tagging it”?
Well, x-kit does that and so much more.
X-kit makes tumblr easier and faster to use. It gives you extensions such as post block (which blocks posts that you don’t want to see on your dash) and color quotes (which makes it so much easier to follow a conversation through reblogs). (A full list of features is here.) And the awesome x-kit guy is constantly updating, upgrading and fixing anything that goes wrong with the extension.
Note: Tumblr doesn’t seem to like 3rd party extensions very much as is described here and here.
Luckily, the X-kit guy is awesome about fixing anything that breaks whenever Tumblr makes changes to its API and he’s pretty quick about it too. And he always keeps his users updated and informed.
So, how do you use it?
The X-kit interface looks something like this:
It pops up on top of your dashboard.
Note: The dashboard shown here looks different from the typical tumblr dashboard as I have Stylish installed and a skin enabled for the dash. When installing X-kit, it’ll tell you to disable Stylish as it may affect the extension. I, myself, have had little to no problems with having both X-kit and Stylish enabled, but it’s best that you disable it when installing X-kit.
The interface itself is pretty simple. The tabs are on the bottom and the only time the interface directs you to somewhere else is in the about and support tab. X-kit comes with a few extensions preinstalled and you can get more in the get extensions tab. I find X-kit pretty intuitive to use and the interface is nice and clean. And you can easily exit out of it by clicking anywhere else on the screen. Also, even if you have trouble with installation instructions, they’re pretty simple for X-kit.
X-kit is available for all the major browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Opera).
I would highly recommend getting this extension. Once you use it, you will never go back to the standard tumblr interface.
