Too Epic // Tagged as “Tumblr”

Jun 23 12:47 am

Kudos

To whoever is responsible for the redesign of Tumblr’s mobile site. I’m guessing an updated Tumblr app isn’t too far off. I just wish there was an apple-touch-icon for the mobile dashboard and an option to view the page in chromefree mode from the homescreen. The application is nice, sure, but nothing beats full screen landscape browsing goodness.

Jun 19 5:18 pm

# 102

Freshly Caught

staff:

lloyda2:

It is not helpful in designing a theme that Tumblr throws in inline style attributes in its preview.

Thanks for catching that! That was left over from an ancient bug. We just pulled out the style attribute, so it shouldn’t be a problem now.

I might as well use this as an opportunity to list a few more issues lingering in Tumblr:

The iframe which appears in the top right of each Tumblr user’s blog employs deprecated attributes and is responsible for four markup validation errors. No biggie: this one is a minor annoyance.
Permalink pagination is broken, and has been for at least the past few months—possibly since the feature was first introduced. Going backwards in time works just fine, but there’s something wrong with the {NextPost} url which causes every single instance of the {NextPost} tag on every single permalink page to link to a (seemingly random) recent post submitted. See for yourself: Go here and press newer. Then do the same for this post. See?
I feel like this one was intentional, but when I perform an indent from tumblr’s nice wysiwyg text editor, the resultant blockquote has a bunch of nasty style crud attached to it, eg:
```
<blockquote style="margin: 0 0 0 40px; border: none; padding: 0px;">
```
I think this is unnecessary: the stylesheet of the user’s theme should be able to handle a blockquote appropriately.

Much thanks for listening to your users and for being continually diligent.

Via: Tumblr Staff

Jun 16 10:35 pm

# 1

Today, my mom is a tumblr user»

Back in February, my mother commissioned me to churn out a redesign for her website to go along with her upcoming book of short stories, set to be released in September. Her former site, also written by myself (back in 2005), was a series of hand-updated html pages. I took this redesign as an opportunity to add some much-needed dynamic content to the site.

Because my mom was a bit intimidated by the prospect of maintaining a conventional blog, I decided to rely on tumblr as the basis for the news section of the site. The prime criterion that led to selecting tumblr over self-hosted lightweight blogging engines, such as Chyrp, was tumblr’s straight-forward dashboard interface. Even my technologically inept mother managed to figure out how to click “Text,” fill out two boxes, and tap “Create Post.”

The rest of the site was hobbled together with jQuery and Simplepie. Simplepie is a goliath of an RSS parser (the single PHP file is a whopping 348 KB), but it was easy to bend to my will for use in a google calender-backed events page. I’m also filtering posts through Smartypants for typographical correctness.

I’ll probably come back to optimize the site further down the line, but for now my client is appeased, and I’m sleepy.

May 15 9:55 pm

“The Theme Garden is about a week away from being rolled into the Customize page (along with a bunch of other fixes to the theme submission/approval process), where your themes will wind up getting a lot more love from users.”

Straight from the mouth of the tumblr manhorse.

Sounds excellent.

Apr 5 12:39 pm

# 38

Some Words on Commenting

dailymeh:

So you have a blog. You want people to be able to publically react to what you write. You want debate, or at the very least feedback. What are you going to do? If I were in a pompous mood, I’d call it the Commenting Problem… (Post clipped to conserve space. I suggest reading the whole entry on Simen’s site)

Why not have your like/vapid reblog cake and eat it too? I just implemented some changes to my notes display per your suggestions. My tumblelog is kind of an experimental mess right now, so the design isn’t exactly as thoughtfully executed as I’d like, but I think my current permalink page setup, which allows visitors to toggle the visibility of the less significant notes, is a step in the right direction.

Via: Enthusiasms

Mar 2 5:20 pm

# 410

HAH

staff:

Now you can flip between Dashboard pages with the left (←) and right (→) arrow keys. This is great if you’re trying to navigate the Dashboard with a sandwich in one hand.

Let us know if you catch anything acting funny.

I might be too hip for tumblr. I’ve had this feature on my own site since October. It’s pretty simple stuff.

Via: Tumblr Staff

Feb 20 8:22 pm

# 5

(via mobelux)

I don’t quite understand, but I’m going to take a stab in the red curtain and guess a new version of tumblrette is on its way? If so, I’m excited.

Via: Mobelux

Feb 11 9:04 pm

Remux Theme now available»

This is the theme I created for Band Names. Hopefully someone will find it useful. The permalink pages are pretty awesome.

Features:

Automatic post coloring based on Muxtape’s color scheme.
Random post coloring or post coloring by tag (eg: tag a post with “Turquoise” and it’ll appear turquoise) if you know how to comment out some of the javascript.
Keyboard shortcuts for pagination, as always.
Ridiculous jQuery abound. Centering the images was kind of difficult.
Support for groups, day pages, permalink pages, and search are built in. I might add tag support somewhere down the line.

Feel free to email me if you’ve got any suggestions for improvements or if you’re just having technical difficulties.