the hi there broadcast episode 1: Site in a Night

And the final product? lolstock!

Aside form a couple tweaks and bugs we discovered after some other Tumblr users “liked” a couple of our posts, it was all done in a night…a long, cold night. Here’s some info, tips, and things we learned along the way developing on Tumblr:

Blog Platform
Tumblr is a fun and simple platform that’s sort of in-between your standard blogging and microblogging. It’s simple to set up and almost kinda fun to use. With simplicity comes lack of flexibility, though.

Setting up a custom domain is really easy: http://www.tumblr.com/docs/custom_domains

Tumblr redirects yourblog.tumblr.com to your domain and there were no issues out of the box with www and non-www versions of the domain as we’ve experienced on Blogger before.

There’s a fun social aspect to Tumblr as well. You can follow other blogs, mark favourites, and reblog other posts.

Custom Template
The template is entirely custom and the entire style and layout is done in one file, found in the “customize” menu with the other settings, making it pretty easy to edit and preview changes as you go.

Sharing
Tumblr can auto-generate short URLs for you with this variable: {ShortURL}

This made the sharing links really quite straightforward:
http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u={ShortURL}%2F&t=lolstock”

http://twitter.com/home?status=lol!%20stock%20photography…%20{ShortURL}

We could dynamically insert pretty much whatever else we wanted, such as titles or captions, but that may end up too long or may be missing, so we kept it simple.

Here’s a list of all their custom code: http://www.tumblr.com/docs/custom_themes

Commenting
Disqus is a hosted comment system that’s really easy to implement by setting up your account all from their website and pasting a snippet of code on your website. Although we’re not huge fans of their commenting UI (a bit complicated in appearance) it does the job well.

Other stuff
In Tumblr’s list of features they mention search engine friendliness. It’s true but we wouldn’t recommend this if you’re die-hard into SEO or it’s a major concern for a particular project. WordPress or even Blogger would be better suited, however for our purposes it’s perfect.

XML sitemaps are generated by Tumblr at yourblog/sitemap1.xml e.g. http://lolstock.com/sitemap1.xml

A part of a Google Webmaster Tools setup, these XML sitemaps are the standard used by the major search engines, essentially to provide a list of all your content. Although it’s not necessary in order to be indexed, it helps ensure it all content gets crawled properly. Also, and probably more important, Webmaster Tools will give you some insight on how Google perceives the content of your site in terms of top keywords and will show you if there were any errors while crawling your site. Definitely worthwhile for how little time it takes.

If you want to know anything else just leave us your question.

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