A Short Introduction to the Tumblr Blogging Platform

This month, also known as SepTumblr, we’re starting a new series of Articles about Tumblr. Tumblr is getting popular day after day because of its flexibility, power and simplicity. Tumblr is a blogging platform through which you can share your content, images and videos with the world even when you’re on the go.

The Tumblr platform is popular mostly due to the fact that Tumblr tries to combine the best parts of blogging and micro-blogging. You can post huge chunks of text and/or multi-media posts, like regular blogs, but Tumblr also makes it very easy to follow other Bloggers and to share their content, just like we do on Twitter.

Tumblr has a number of ways to reward people who post unique, interesting, creative or inspiring content. For instance by following other users you can view their posts in your dashboard, but you also have the option to reblog or like posts from anyone, whether you follow them or not.

‘Reblog’, .. WTF? If you come across a post that you feel is worth sharing or you want to add your own thoughts, you can reblog the post on your own blog. With this ability to quickly reblog any posts we really can interact with a digital community as bloggers.

Getting Started

Starting out with Tumblr is sooo easy. Go to Tumblr.com and sign up by entering your email address, a password and the desired URL you want to use (YourName.tumblr.com). You’ll have the option to set up a custom domain name after you’ve signed up. Once your account is set up, you can start posting right away .. now that’s easy!

Hundreds of themes are available on Tumblr’s Theme Garden, most of them BTW for free. Outside of Tumblr’s official Theme Garden, there are some companies that always have been focusing on WordPress themes and are now offering Tumblr versions too (The Theme Foundry and Obox-design). Although these themes can’t offer one-click installs, adding a new theme to your site is very simple.

Take the time to go through the theme options when you sign up, either to find a good blog for yourself or to get inspiration to create your own theme. We will NOT be discussing how to make a custom theme, there are some great tuts on the blogosphere if you want to find out more how to design a custom Tumblr Blog Theme [How to Create a Tumblr Theme (Code Structure)].

Most Tumblr themes come with some customization options that don’t require any HTML and CSS knowledge (if you plan to create some public themes, you’ll probably want to include some customization options). You can also customize your blog by adding custom CSS that will override existing styles.

Next week I’ll be showing you some of the best Free Tumblr Themes available, so hope you’ll all visit the gonzoblog next Wednesday?

Types of Blogposts

Tumblr has prefab formats for all 8 content types: text, photo, chat, audio, video, quote, link and answered questions – these formats make Tumblr stand out from other blogging and micro-blogging platforms. Most themes take advantage of the differences between these post types and have a special styling for each format.

If you’re posting a video, the video itself is the primary subject and then of course you can also add plain text to most of these post types, and images to your text posts. This way enabling you to create more typical blog posts with a combination of text, images and video in the single post. Because of the unique post formats, Tumblr makes a perfect platform for vlogging and podcasting, as well as for photo blogging.

Coding Structure

Tumblr themes have the same basic parts as any website. There’s usually a header and main content area, as well as an optional sidebar and footer. Tumblr uses two operators to render specific types of content in your HTML, and you’ll need to familiarize yourself with both if you want to make your own custom theme. These operators are Variables and Blocks.

Any Tumblr theme is simply a single page of HTML code with conditional case variables in between. Variables are exactly what the name suggests. A place-holder tag that our data is dynamically inserted into. They are used all across the theme in anything from titles to our dates.

{Title}, {Description}, {RSS} and {Favicon}.

As shown above, there are basic variables for things like the theme title, description and favicon. There are unique variables for each of the post formats, too. Some formats (like text posts) have only a handful of variables, while others have over a dozen.

A complete list of Tumblr variables can be found on the Creating a Custom HTML Theme page on Tumblr’s website. The page also includes more information on creating Tumblr themes in general.

In addition to the theme variables, Tumblr uses a system of blocks to render blocks of HTML related to a specific set of data, such as posts, post types, tags and pagination. Blocks are either used as conditional elements that are only rendered if the data type exists, or they serve as a loop that renders HTML for each of the elements within the block

Here’s an example of a basic text-post structure that you might use to create your template.

{block:Text}         
<div id="content">
<!-- The optional text post title block will be rendered if a title exists -->
{block:Title}
<h1>{Title}</h1>
{/block:Title}           
{Body}         
 </div>       
{/block:Text}

Blocks on the other hand are a sort of step up from variables. They are used to display chunks of html and variables for different occurrences, e.g. for each different kind of Tumblr post. They can even be used conditionally to display stuff such as next and previous page links. Like variables, blocks use curly brackets, but are defined as a block, and open and close in a manner similar to html elements.

The Tumblr loop has a huge number of variables to take advantage of. You’ll need to define blocks for each post type in order to display them properly in your theme. Beyond that, you choose what to include in your theme.

Some of Tumblr’s Unique Features

Not only does Tumblr simplify the post types, it also gives you a wide range of ways to use your blog:

• There are several ways to post to your Tumblog: via the Dashboard, via the mobile app, via email (sophisticated email publishing) and Call-in audio posts with a toll-free number.
• All of your blogs come with an optimised and handsome mobile layout for the iPhone, BlackBerry, Android and more.
• Integration of third-party applications (we’ll be discussing these in a next article in this SepTumblr series).
• Option to reblog or like posts from anyone, whether you follow them or not.
• A rich and fascinating Tumblr community.
• An incredibly useful built-in Customize menu, which enables you to personalise, extend and control a number of features.
• Tumblr’s admin interface is sleek, it’s simple and not graphics-heavy.
• The built-in Facebook, Twitter and FeedBurner tools are definitely worth using if you don’t want to mess with third-party solutions.
• The queue feature is a great way to keep fresh content bubbling up to the front page of your blog and holding the audience’s attention.
• Possibility to make your own custom design.
• Your blog won’t be completely customized until you’re using your own domain name, and fortunately this is very easy too.

Not everything is equally Brilliant

But as the saying goes, ‘nobody is perfect’, that also counts for Tumblr (as well as all those other blogging platforms):

• Tumblr doesn’t have file transfer protocol (FTP) capabilities. To make changes to your theme, copy and paste your code into a window in the customization interface.
• Using the queue-feature has also some flaws of it’s own: there are times when it works perfectly, but on more than a few occasions my entire queue has been published at once.

Conclusion

Tumblr is a unique microblogging platform calling themselves “the easiest way to blog”— and ease of use is certainly true, .. for sure. Sharing the usual suspects (text and links) is dead simple, but Tumblr really excels when sharing media such as photos, video and music.

Do you have any experience with Tumblr, I’d love to hear your thoughts ..