Matthew Buchanan

From today, my new Solaris theme is available as part of Tumblr’s premium themes collection, to be officially launched later this week. Here’s a little rundown of what it offers:

• Configurable icon sizes and colours
• Optional “dark” palette, set in the Appearance menu
• Option to display tags on summary and/or post pages
• Option to display post authors
• Lightbox for high-res images
• Pages, Submissions & Ask support
• Custom display of audio artwork and artist/track name
• Custom display of like, reply and reblog notes
• Display of liked posts and followed blogs
• Support for Disqus and Google Analytics
• Custom copyright message

The dark mode, visible in the wild on Nudge Up, seems to be a hit. Solaris is nine bucks via the super-slick new e-commerce process in the Theme Garden.

Big thanks to David, Peter and the team for inviting me to be part of this pilot, which I hope to see opened up to more of Tumblr’s design community soon. On that note, don’t miss my colleague Mike Harding’s delicious Scaffold theme, also for just $9.

Almost forgot: I’ve released National Park from my own site as well.

Update: there is now a version history page that lists new features, bug fixes and improvements to the theme.

Late last year I posted a jQuery function to replace the standard YouTube Flash player with a tweaked version that improves the aesthetics by removing the background gradient in the control bar. Hayden Hunter has provided a useful extension that queries YouTube’s API and further modifies the embed code to produce a player that respects the video’s widescreen aspect ratio if set.

I’ve placed the new code on Pastie under a Creative Commons attribution license: pastie.org/871790