Starting a blog on Tumblr - Lessons Learned
by
at 2012-04-22 03:37:00
original http://hjortureh.tumblr.com/post/21516694234
I used to procrastinate forever about starting a blog. I felt I had to decide so many things, what blog platform to use, how the design should be, what to write about, who is the target audience and of course the blog never came about.
Then one day I finally realized, if I make this such a big deal this blog will never be born. So, I decided to start focusing on writing something. Second, I started a simple blog on Wordpress with some free theme. This has improved slowly into this blog today.
Why to blog ?
The main reason for me is because it feels good, it helps me to learn and hopefully it’s useful for someone else in the process. I don’t have any grand plan of getting traffic and making a lot of money out of ads or selling stuff. I think that would be the totally wrong reason.
Blogging is a great way to capture thoughts and form them into something that makes sense. These days I try write down good ideas when they appear in my brain so I have material ready when I have time to blog. In some cases I write a post in about 15 minutes and publish it right away. There is no better motivation for fixing grammar and typos than getting it in front of the public.
Why Tumblr
I tried Wordpress as it seemed the most popular at the time, but found it to be quite a monster. The problem with Wordpress is that it tries to be good at everything. Content management, analytics, comments and other things are all built into Wordpress. All these features slow it down and make it complicated for a simple guy like me.
The great thing about Tumblr is its focus on making the blogging experience as simple and social as possible. To get analytics on a Tumblr blog use Google Analytics, for comments use Disqus and Tumblr focuses on what they do best, being a blogging platform.
One of the greatest surprises on Tumblr is how active the community is and I’m often surprised to see how many people follow, like & reblog stuff on this humble little blog.
Tumblr Tips
When hitting a certain stage in one’s blogging maturity there comes a time for a custom theme. Creating a custom theme on Tumblr is very straightforward for people with html / css skills, for information check Tumblr documentation for custom themes.
I created my custom theme by copying the boilerplate html into my personal code editor ( Sublime Text 2 ), commented out the Tumblr tags and implemented my design. When ready I copied the code into the online html editor on my blog, removed the comments and made everything work within Tumblr. The path to edit the HTML code is:
Customize -> Edit HTML
Before making a post I recommend turning the rich editor off and use the custom HTML editor. This will increase the time it takes to post but it gives full control over the markup.
Dashboard -> Preferences -> Check “Plain text/HTML”
There is also a option to use Markdown editor that might be more efficient but I havn’t tried it myself yet.
Tumblr applies a grayish theme for all blogs by default on mobile devices. This is a little bit old fashioned as most web pages today are responsive and adopt to different screen sizes. It is possible to turn this off on your blog.
Customize -> Advanced -> Uncheck “Use optimized mobile layout”
Tumblr also limits the size on uploaded images to 500px width, so if you upload bigger images it will be scaled down and look blurry. This blog for example is 550px in width and I like to use the full width for images, so this feature is useless for me.
As a solution I use Dropbox and just copy the images to a public folder on Dropbox that I have for this blog. All files on Dropbox get an unique url that can be put in a img tag on a blog post, that works perfectly.
If you have code examples on your blog I recommend using Highlight.js for syntax highlighting. Highlight.js supports numerous programming languages and has multiple themes. Put this before the closing body tag to enable it on your blog.
<link rel="stylesheet"
href="http://yandex.st/highlightjs/6.2/styles/monokai.min.css">
<script
src="http://yandex.st/highlightjs/6.2/highlight.min.js"></script>
<script>hljs.initHighlightingOnLoad();</script>
Going forward
The purpose of blogging is to learn and become just a little bit better every day, that is why the name of this blog is “Constant improvement”.
This time I learned that Tumblr is a great platform and I look forward to use it more in the feature.