Believe it or not, up to now I’ve been doing blog posts the hard way, i.e. hand crafted HTML. While this produced very clean HTML output, it just lacked a number of features I really wanted like tags, comments and so on. So when I found out about tumblr, it was rather a question of finding the time to move everything than do it or not do it…
Actually, the whole procedure was rather painless although it took a couple of hours to figure all the customization stuff out:
Getting tumblr to work as a subdomain of athenstean.com was quite easy: add a new configuration to my DNS account, add the address inside tumblr, done. Customizing the appearance was a bit more tricky. Basically one does write a HTML template and adds certain text fragments defined by tumblr which are then filled in to show the blog text, comments, images, … the only tricky part was that I like centered images/videos inside text and sometimes like to have text floating around images. The trick is to define a custom CSS inside the “customize appearance” tumblr dialog and then use CSS-classes not CSS-styles inside the blog posts. For some reason tumblr’s HTML editor removes all style attributes when saving changes. This is most likely to support a very cool feature that allowed me to copy&paste my old posts from the browser into the editor and automatically matched what was a heading, what was an image and what was normal text.
I’m now trying to figure out how to add the tags and comment part to my customized appearance…
– Alex
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