As the saying goes, I’m “eating my own dog food” for a while. I’ve changed to a Tumblr theme that I built in an effort to make sure it’s working perfectly.

This afternoon I took a few pics with my iPhone and I wanted to upload them directly to my Tumblr. Opening up my handy Tumblr app, I was quickly disappointed to find that I could only attach one photo. So I decided to pull up the site in Safari and was again let down. For some reason the mobile version of the site only allowed one photo as well! So I googled my problem and couldn’t find a decent solution. I was about to give up.

So I pulled open the dashboard on my desktop and saw that I could add multiple photos there and I was a bit confused. The big joy of having an app for Tumblr is that I can update the blog straight from the phone - right away, no computer required. After what seemed like an endless search, I discovered my answer - email. This help file explains that by going to the “Goodies” page, you can find the email address for posting to your blog and send a photoset very quickly that way. I’m quite happy with this solution as I really like Tumblr, but was really considering using Posterous in this case. I’m such a fan of Tumblr that I’ve actually started working on a few themes for it. I’ll announce something as soon as they’re ready. :)

http://www.tumblr.com/docs/en/posting#posting-by-email

The theme you see on my tumblr page currently is known as the “Fluid Theme” by Metalab. It’s a great looking theme, but I’m a designer so I intend to make my own. I’m new to tumblr so I thought I’d start by customizing an existing theme and slowly working it into something that fits with my branding over at painteddigital.com

Let’s get started

To start customizing, you first need to enable the theme in your tumblr “customize” options and click the button to allow custom HTML. Now we can see some code! If you scroll way down to the bottom, you can see these large bars of “#” signs that look like this:

Remove the Code

Thankfully, Metalab has set up up with an easy template to edit. You will notice a line that says “Uncomment this…” We are going to delete that line and the line that says “—>” near the bottom. Once you’ve deleted those, you can go about inserting your own links into the sidebar as I’ve done.

You’ll want to change the link inside the href=”” and change the description. For more info on html links, read here. If you have any questions, ask away. You can see my edited HTML below.

Adding Categories

You might notice that I also applied the same formatting to create “Categories.” Tumblr doesn’t have categories like Wordpress has them, so you can create your own by tagging a post in whatever format you like and then add a link to your sidebar with the format “http://your_tumblog/tagged/your_tag” you can see how I did it in above.

I hope you found this post useful. I’m going to keep adding and adjusting as I learn tumblr and one day, it’ll look completely different. If you found all this to be above your head, you can hire me to design and develop a tumblog for you. I work as a freelancer and you can see some of my work at http://painteddigital.com

You can also buy some custom tumblr themes at themeforest: