jkspn asked:
Will you ever be releasing themes to the Theme Garden? Your old one and this one both look nice!
I struggle with this. I’d love to release some of my old themes, but the amount of time they’d require to clean up, make generic, and add features to is a little overwhelming. I am hoping to make my previous theme available at some point, probably as a very cheap premium theme.
swimmindustries asked:
Really like the new look. I am just starting to move my site to Tumblr and wondering how you handle theme building. It's such a pain. I've messed around with TumblrThemr, but that has its own set of issues. If you have a non SUPER PAINFUL way to customize I'd love to hear it.
I actually find the theming system at Tumblr to be pretty decent. There are quirks, but once you get used to them, it’s pretty easy to get into a good workflow for creating a new theme. I tend to work at this sort of backward. I design the theme and HTML with real test content and then replace that with template tags when I’m ready to go live. Here’s my general path:
After doing it once or twice, you’ll get the hang of it. Good luck!
Finally had a chance to put the finishing touches on a new design for this site. I’ve been thinking about this new design for about four months, and working on the actual code on and off for the past two weeks. The last time I redesigned was in April of 2010—nearly a year and a half ago. For me, that’s a personal record (I’ve redesigned this site 20 times in the past 6 years alone).
The focus this time around was:
A completely new thing for me: I based this design on a theme. I purchased the HIGH RES Theme by JSTN and used that as a base to customize and design on. I’ve been coveting the HIGH RES theme for months now and it was a lot of fun to make it my own.
In addition, I accidentally and shamelessly took Will’s idea for a rounded-avatar header. He claims he has forgiven me, but I’m not so sure.
People who read regularly know that over the past seven months or so I’ve been very critical of Tumblr, the service that has powered my site since 2007. Starting back in January I wrote a post titled “Time for a Change” wherein I lamented the downtime and feature bugs and announced my plans to move to a different service. Then, in March, after a period of several weeks of many outtages and lots of downtime, I snapped one morning and created a jokey-but-scathing alternative error page for Tumblr. I knew it was harsh, but I also knew that for several months my website was down all the time and it was taking its toll on me. That post received a total of 612 likes and reblogs, which told me I wasn’t the only person fed up.
This led, that same day, to me posting a followup explaining how badly I wanted Tumblr to charge for their service, and why I thought it would lead to a better, more stable platform. This post received nearly 300 likes and reblogs once again confirming I wasn’t alone.
And so it went. I continued to bitch and moan, and the service continued to suffer. After my critical posts, the entire team at Tumblr unfollowed my account (and those following me on Twitter also unfollowed there). David Karp used to like my posts regularly and give me nice comments and feedback occasionally. We exchanged emails here and there and we were on very friendly terms before all of my complaining. Jacob Bijani would occasionally @reply me on Twitter and like my posts on Tumblr. These guys are very nice and I respect all the work they do. So I felt terrible as I watched them systematically unfollow me, but at the same time I couldn’t get past the simple truth that the service they were providing was failing me on a daily basis.
“I’m not here to make friends” has crossed my mind many times throughout my career in this industry, because it’s the opposite of how I feel. I’m here to make friends. I’ve made friends with so many fantastic people over the past 10 years, and I can’t imagine my life without these folks. So when my actions directly correlate to good, smart people turning away and never looking back, it’s a hard pill to swallow (related to this is the group of amazing people at Facebook whom I’ve also offended in various ways across the years, but that’s for a different day).
I sent David several emails about the problems with Tumblr and he continued to express both sympathy and urgency and an overall “we’re working on fixing it ASAP” message, but it just didn’t feel like anything was happening. For months, uptime was a roller-coaster and features would work sometimes and not others. It was initially frustrating, then angering, then infuriating every time I saw that goofy error page. Reports of Tumblr hiring more engineers kept surfacing, but no real-world results were visible to me as a user.
Under all my complaining and joke-making was a real, genuine message: I love Tumblr and I want it to be better. I kept mentioning that I wanted to pay for the service, pay to make it better, pay to support it. I reiterated to everyone who asked why I liked the service so much to begin with that the people who were building it were doing fun, interesting things and that the likes/reblogs system was great for getting your content in front of more eyes. I continued to preface every complaint with “I love Tumblr and I want to keep using it, but…”. But eventually I ran out of energy and gave up.
So here we are in June, just three months later. And what’s the situation like now? I’m happy to report it’s much better. Downtime and outtages seem very rare these days—I’ve only seen the error page once in two months. And, just recently, Tumblr has begun adding new features and redesigning the UI again. The new Messages functionality they released last week was a huge change that I immediately appreciated (I was finally able to answer boatloads of questions privately), and the new Dashboard design is refined and svelte. The future looks very bright for Tumblr, and I’m glad I didn’t jump ship back when the skies were darkest. That doesn’t erase what happened, but the team is doing a hell of a job handling the load and getting new stuff out. Credit where credit is due.
I’m sad to have lost the potential friendships, but I’m glad Tumblr is getting better. Just last week, in an Adweek interview, David said:
You get error messages at Google, you get exceptions when accessing the Facebook API. At this scale there are way too many moving parts for it not to happen. Desktop computers still freeze. When people post a screenshot of an error page and we know that they hit refresh once and happened to get an error, that does frustrate me.
He probably wasn’t thinking of me specifically, but I’m in there. While he’s perfectly within his right to be frustrated by complaints about a service he has poured his heart and soul into—and while I understand how crushing it can feel being a software developer myself—the other side to this is that if you act like there isn’t a problem or you take too long solving it, users don’t feel like they can trust you. Tumblr is earning back that trust now, I’m just sorry for the collateral damage.
Daniel Jalkut gives Tumblr some sage advice:
If Tumblr turned off new user registrations today and added a “notify me when more new users are being accepted” sign-up form, it would provide breathing room to focus on fixing the experience for current customers. Framed correctly, it would also make those customers feel cared for and important, something they probably aren’t feeling so much at the moment.
And, even more succinctly:
If you’re bailing out a sinking boat, the first thing to do is stop admitting new passengers.
I think this is a very good idea. If Tumblr wishes to remain a free service (which I don’t think is wise, but alas), they should at least temporarily slow growth until they can stabilize the platform and build a larger team.
About 1% of the feedback to my ridiculous Tumblr Error Page post has been that I’m a stupid jackass for complaining about a free service (the other 99% is likes and agreeing reblogs). But here’s the thing, folks: I’ve been complaining for years that Tumblr is free. I don’t want it to be free. I want to pay for it. Tumblr is one of the few services on earth that refuses to take my money. And it’s a shame, because rather than taking VC or running a tiny team, they could be charging customers, making money, and growing the service while remaining stable.
I’m of the opinion there’s no reason to give away a product for free if you want it to succeed. Sure, there are outliers here, but most of them, such as Gmail, use advertising anyway so they’re not technically free. Eventually, everything costs money. Don’t wait until it’s too late and then have to decide between angering cheap customers or being successful. Most users of free services are douchebags. I’ve no doubt that 90% of Tumblr’s users would flee if there was a monthly cost announced, but that’s fine—you don’t want those users long-term anyway. If someone isn’t interested in supporting your service, they’re not a good customer. Real customers spend fair amounts of money on things they appreciate.
Restaurants aren’t going around giving away free meals. It’s a business. It costs money to run, even more money to run well, and you expect people who solicit your service to pay their fair share. Why are internet businesses any different?
Tumblr’s New Error Page (View full-size)
Look, I really like all the folks at Tumblr, but how is it possible that you cannot go a single day without getting an error at least twice? Lots of users, lots of load, I get it. But seriously, come on.
To all the pinheads telling me I shouldn’t complain about a free service: I don’t want Tumblr to be free. I want to pay for it! Read more.
Here’s the frustrating thing about Tumblr: If you ignore all the downtime, errors, server outages and all that annoying stuff, which took sites down for nearly two full days recently and still continues to crop up regularly—if you somehow ignore all of that—simple things still don’t work properly, like the queue.
I use the queue for Prettify* so that I can do lots of future content pre-loading. In fact, Prettify* is currently scheduled with content releases for the next several months. Each post is scheduled for a specific time and date. But then today, for no reason, Tumblr just arbitrarily published some of the scheduled posts at random times. An item scheduled for Thursday at 10AM published itself today at 4PM. Sure, why not? That doesn’t ruin my plans at all.
If you have a feature called a queue, and it allows you to schedule posts, then it had better work. Otherwise, get rid of it. The queue has been buggy and problematic since its launch and even the “new queue”, released in October, did not fix these problems.
I loved Tumblr for the first few years I used it, but these days it feels like headache after headache. Sadly, I have begun to plan for alternate options and will eventually move my site to a different platform. While I’m sure the folks at Tumblr are working on these problems, the amount of time wasted in the past year alone on bugs, outages and frustration are hardly worth it any longer.
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