Voice Quick Tips – Tumblr, cool tricks and customisation

Author:  Nick  Wa/s,  December  2011  

A little about Tumblr

Tumblr is a blogging platform, much like Wordpress and Blogger but with a very social edge when it comes to following, feeds and online communities.

I use it for my own blogs, my charities blogs and when we do specific engagements, as a micro blog for specific campaigns.

It’s perfect for those who don’t want a full blown website, but a friendly, easy to use and highly customisable blogging platform to share your thoughts, posts, photo’s, video’s and even quotes and conversations.

So here is my few cool things I like about Tumblr and a little bit on customisation!

Themes

Much like all the other blogging platforms Tumblr has a massive list of both free and ‘premium’ themes to choose from. This can negate the need to have knowledge of HTML or CSS to get the look and feel you want. Depending on which theme you choose, you can customise it without having any knowledge of code, today I am using a very simple example, redux (h/p://www.tumblr.com/theme/433), which is a very simple, free theme and the standard one on Tumblr blogs. So all I have done is set up a new blog in my own tumblr account ‘example’ and to customise it, all you have to do is click customise appearance in the right hand menu.

At the moment it looks a little like this

Simple changes…

So what can we do with no knowledge or experience with code or Tumblr?

Having clicked customise appearance you get a little preview of your blog and on the left hand side a customise menu… As you make changes you will see them change in the preview!

The first input box you will see on the left hand side is the title and description box, so we can instantly add a new title and little description on the blog itself.

Just below that we can set our preferences, do you want to show your followers, show your tags on your posts? If you post music do you want the cover art to be automatically found? If you have disqus you can enter your u/name to enable disqus commenting

Simple visual changes

In this theme the visual changes are very easy to complete, providing you do not want to change the layout of the blog… In the same left hand menu there is a section called Appearance…

From here we can do something as simple as change the background colour of our blog, the fonts that are posts are display in and if you have a banner you can upload a header image.

Alternatively, you can add your own artwork to the background by uploading your background image.

So as it is Christmas time, I am going to upload some falling snow onto this blog. The preview again changes automatically.

Pages

Maybe you would like an about page, or a contact details page within your blog? In the same left hand menu we have been using all this time there is a menu called pages… If you have no pages it will look a little something like this…

So we click add a page and this little window pops up…

If your new to html and css then standard layout works amazing, if you want simple text and maybe a picture or two, if you choose custom you will need to use html to build it. The third option ‘redirect’ is simply a button that goes to another site.

Then enter the page title, the URL will make itself from the title and then if you want a button tick show a link to this page.

Then get typing your content.

Pages continued

So now we have done the settings and written some content (using the standard bold, italic options in the toolbar) we can add an image to it by simply clicking upload photo in the corner and choosing the file from your computer. If you use the photo icon in the toolbar it will expect it to be a URL to a site such as photobucket.

Once your done, just hit the create page button…

Back on the menu, you can edit the page whenever, and if you have many pages, change the order by dragging and dropping

Your Profile Photo & other cool bits!

Now we have played with the look of the blog very simply we can change the blank head to a photo. To do this click save and then close at the top of the left hand customisation menu and it will return you to the dashboard…

Go into settings……

Your Profile Photo & other cool bits! Here you can; •  Upload your photo at the

top •  Change your Tumblr

address (or even use a customer address)

•  Allow people to ask you questions through your blog

•  Allow people to submit posts to you

•  Share on Facebook and Twitter

•  You can also set and RSS feed, change language, timezone and password protect your blog on this same screen.

And now it looks a bit like this…

So you can see the button for the page we created, the description we entered, the background (The snow falls!) and the title change! (and a little old profile photo of me!)

Now get blogging!

With your new look blog you can get blogging, when you log into tumblr simply select the kind of post you want and follow the simple instructions to create…

Of course this was very simple customisation and the option depends on the theme you choose when you set up your blog (which you can change in customisation at any times) of course if you know your way around HTML and CSS the sky’s the limit to what you change (adding a twitter feed etc..)

Enjoy your new found Tumblr blog!

Contact

If you have any comments please contact:

Nick Watts E-mail: nickwatts@nfpvoice.com Mobile: 07538 36 44 51 Twitter: @nickinoxford and @nfpvoice Skype: nickwattsox