Getting comfortable with Tumblr
Ran into my first stumbling block with Tumblr when trying to find a theme for my “tumblog” (as I believe they are called). At first I thought it’d be easy, after all there were a lot of themes on display in the Theme Garden. The first few attempts looked stylish but didn’t have what I was looking for, namely:
- Lots of horizontal room for posts, given I wanted something that allowed for significantly longer entries than Twitter
- Some kind of customizable graphic at the top, to set the tone
- A list in the sidebar of people I was following
- Room in the sidebar for other elements, such as pointers off to my podcast, blip.fm presence, etc.
I spent nearly two hours and tried each and every theme. No joy, though the tumblrist theme by Chris Topher came pretty close. In the process of poking around I discovered Tumblr’s well put together creating a custom HTML theme page and decided I would try adding what I wanted to tumblrist.
What you see here is the result of that effort. Some experience with HTML and CSS is required though I’m no expert. Experimentation via Tumblr’s preview feature makes quick trial-and-error easy enough so you can try something, see if it works, and modify/withdraw it with a few clicks. I have more tinkering to do, but for now this is close enough.
