The Updated Notes Dashboard
The notes dashboard is now updated and complete! It tracks note activity for Martin and Bosco’s Tumblr post, using data pulled from the /notes API. It’s a continuation of the original post, which explained the plots and why they matter.
ⓣ Go directly to the section containing a text-based summary of the dashboard’s highlights.
Access the Dashboard
Launch the Dashboard: Click to launch. It opens in your browser.
Best Viewed: On a laptop or desktop. On small screens, landscape orientation is suggested for improved plot display and easier use of interactive features.
The updated dashboard includes a few enhancements for small screens. flexdashboard is a bit of a relic, so mobile optimization is limited — but I really tried. Quarto dashboards are heavily promoted, but I found them too rigid for my project’s requirements.
The complex gauge swaps out for a simple textbox. Mobile users lose a bit of fun, but at least you won’t have to scroll through a giant white box anymore.
A JavaScript tweak disables zoom dragging on mobile, so you won’t get trapped in “zoom doom” while exploring.
The “Contact” link was renamed to “Ask” and moved to the navigation bar for easier access. The last updated time now appears just below the navigation bar. The footer was removed since, like the gauge, it created a giant white box on mobile.
How to Use the Dashboard
You are encouraged to explore the data!
Read the focus question for each section to guide your interpretation.
Look for plots labeled with “ⓘ Hover …” and mouse over the data to reveal tooltips with dates and note counts.
Change the view by clicking legend items on or off.
Read the original post for a full breakdown of how to interpret the plots.
About the Data
- Post notes were collected using Tumblr’s rickety
/notesAPI endpoint:- Started on May 21, 2025.
- Ended on June 12, 2025.
- A total of 277,269 notes were retrieved.
- The R script carefully abided by Tumblr’s API rate limits.
Ethical Data Use
The ethical use of data is important to me! Notes from Martin and Bosco’s post are grouped by type, day, or hour — no blog names or individual actions are part of the dashboard’s underlying structure. All data is publicly available, and no access circumvention methods were used.
Insights from the Data
This section only highlights a few basic trends from the updated /notes API dashboard. A more detailed analysis will be available in the future.
All the Notes
The gauge shows that 100% of the /notes data has been downloaded! The fun gauge took forever to code using plotly, so please take a moment to admire its stunning beauty.
[Mobile users, I’m sorry you’re stuck with the boring purple textbox!]
Engagement Types
(Displayed as a horizontal bar chart.)
User interaction with Martin and Bosco’s post is almost evenly split: 50.8% likes and 49.0% reblogs. Replies barely register at 0.2%.
Martin & Bosco’s Busiest Days
(Displayed as a daily notes line graph.)
You might be surprised to learn that Martin and Bosco’s post didn’t immediately resonate with the Tumblr community. Originally published on July 13, 2022, it only received 775 notes that first day. Nine days later, it hit its highest single-day activity — 14,926 notes on July 22, 2022.
But the spike didn’t come out of nowhere. July 21 saw 14,671 notes, and July 23 still received 7,539. This three-day stretch in 2022 marked the post’s most intense burst of activity. Future analysis will explore what might have triggered this sudden surge in engagement.
A second major activity spike happened on July 14, 2024, with 8,778 notes. This was one day after Martin and Bosco Day was hilariously declared by the Tumblr community.
Martin & Bosco’s Most Active Hours
(Displayed as a stacked bar chart.)
Note activity spikes at 4 AM (12,441 notes), 2 PM (14,435 notes), and 4 PM (15,489 notes) UTC. The quietest stretch is between 9 AM and 10 AM, with hourly counts just over 6,000 notes. Engagement picks up again in the afternoon.
The busiest single hour in the dataset was 9 PM UTC on May 31, 2024, with 1,660 notes; it occurred during a boosted blaze campaign. It was the first time Tumblr staff designated the photo as a “special post” and promoted it to over 100,000 users.
A reminder that the hours shown on the stacked bar chart are based on Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), not your local time.
For example, 4:00 PM UTC is Noon in Eastern Standard Time (Toronto time).
Stay Tuned
Now that the /notes data is finally in, it’s time to wrangle the /posts API endpoint! The new dashboard will show how Martin and Bosco traveled across Tumblr via reblogs — and it’ll update as new data rolls in.