Matthew Buchanan (Home)

Here’s a few tips for anyone who’s installed my recently released Esquire Theme for Tumblr, inspired by the typography and design in the US edition of Esquire magazine:

• To enable Tim Van Damme’s lovely social media icons you’ll need to edit the theme’s HTML code. If you installed the theme from the Tumblr Garden, go to the Customize page and under Theme select Use Custom HTML to reveal the theme code. Find the commented block that begins with <!-- and ends with -->. Remove the first and last lines (plus the two lines of description at the start), then remove all of the services you don’t want to include on your tumblelog by deleting those lines. Edit the URLs of the services you retain so they point to your respective profile pages. Save changes. check the box to “Show social media links” in the Appearance settings, then enter the relevant usernames for the sites you’d like to display.

• To highlight your own notes on a permalink page, find both occurrences of .tumblelog_matthewb in the theme code and change my username to yours (leaving .tumblelog_ in place) enter your Tumblr username in the Appearance settings for the theme (new in version 1.5).

• If you’d prefer the sidebar to scroll along with the rest of the page, change the CSS positioning parameter for #sidebar from fixed to absolute. You’ll find this declaration near the top of the CSS block in the theme code.

• The best place to add Disqus comments is immediately before (or after) the {block:PostNotes} code block. You only need to add it once to the theme, not individually for each post type. Disqus comments are natively supported as of version 1.5. Enter your Disqus shortname in the Appearance settings for the theme.

• Most of the theme’s colours may be customised in the Appearance menu within the Customize section of the Tumblr Dashboard (for example, Jess in Hot Pink).

Thanks to everyone who’s promoted the theme or sent feedback.