A transmission from the deep south.
I’ve made some updates to my Esquire Theme:
Tonight I submitted a major update to Tumblr for approval, it should appear in the next little while in the Theme Garden. Version 1.5 includes much better support for the Disqus plugin (just enter your shortname in the Appearance settings), album art display for audio posts, and an alternative style for quotes (Pete’s zigzag JavaScript wizardry has proven somewhat temperamental).
Why do we Tumbl? In the end, we use Tumblr not because it’s a great way to connect with our readers (though it is that), or because we believe this or something like it is a part of a new way forward for interaction between publishers and audience (though we think that too). We use Tumblr because it’s fun and while, you know, you can’t eat fun, or trade it in for fistfuls of dollars to fund serious journalism, we believe there’s a value in doing things we like simply because we like to do them, and that hopefully our fellow Tumblrs will too.
— Newsweek on why they use Tumblr. (via Meaghan O’Connell)
Just when I thought the scrapbook design meme was played out, MetaLab’s Sara White produces what may be the definitive theme of its type for Tumblr, Vintage Scrapbook. It’s a paid theme via Envato’s Theme Forest, but at $12 — and with MetaLab’s customary attention to every single detail — it’s a steal. I’d love to see an option in Tumblr’s Theme Garden for designers to offer paid themes, perhaps with a revenue split akin to the App Store.
Jarred Bishop’s new project is a song-a-day Tumblr utilising recent support for extracting album art from uploaded tracks. Simply brilliant, from the jewel case design to the single-character unicode URL.
I recognize that it’s hypocritical for me to say this as the lead developer of Tumblr, which does not yet offer an automated feature for users to download backups of their blog content. So I took some time this week and started to write one.
— Marco Arment takes a lesson from last week’s Sidekick data loss incident and is busy implementing complete Tumblr data backups for users to download and store locally, or on a cloud service.
If there’s any blog on Tumblr that needs to be made into a book, it’s this one. This can be the cover.
Public service announcement: now with support for photosets.
Last year I released a plugin to display notes for any post in a Tumblr site, in much the same fashion as the Dashboard does. At the time, in order to display the notes count, the plugin was required to preload all notes for every post, which made it very inefficient. In February, Tumblr added custom theme tags for notes, so here’s an updated version of the plugin I’ve been using for the past few months: it uses theme tags to display the note count, and only loads the content of the notes when a user clicks to view them for a particular post.
The benefit of this approach is the ability to display notes on any page of your Tumblr site, not possible using custom tags alone.
Jarred Bishop’s Light Boner gets some theme love with an early version of his next theme, based on Cargo. Does some crazy nifty things with the Tumblr URL format in order to display posts on the index page. Niiice.
Written and designed by Matthew Buchanan. Colophon. Please give credit. Email
