Thu 11 Mar 2010 642 notes
The question now becomes “why does the post title of a Question post default to the title of the blog?”
Update: because, of course, I hadn’t updated the theme correctly to incorporate Question (actually called Answer) posts. Oh well.
Fri 26 Feb 2010 751 notes
To organize all of the new Reply, Ask, and Submit options we’re building, we just added this “Community” menu to the Customize page.
You’ll see a new option to “Allow replies from people following you for more than two weeks.”
Enabling replies for blogs other than your primary one is almost finished!
A typically Tumblrish implementation of this hot new thing called “blog comments”.
Thu 7 Jan 2010 1,186 notes
Tumblr’s just pulled out a bunch of improvements to the way it handles theme customisation. Relies a lot on HTML meta tags to supply default CSS rules that the inline CSS block can be called on to override.
Not sure I like the mixing of styling and presentation that you have to do for a user-customisable theme. Natively parsing a separate CSS file with theme variables within that file seems like a more organised approach to me.
My next step with this redesign is to add Tumblr “notes”, which are a list of who’s reblogged or “liked” an individual post.
Unfortunately the documentation for this feature is a little sparse. And badly copyedited: “Rendered on permalink pages this post has notes”. Sigh.
The slick Notes functionality on sites like this is what I’m after but I’m not sure how much of that is provided out of the box and how much the designer implemented with Javascript. More investigation required.
Ouch. I’d assumed Posterous had sought permission from Tumblr to use their theme language. Clearly not. I was impressed when I heard the news about Tumblr theme integration as it seemed like it could be a win for both companies as well as designers who wouldn’t need to learn a whole new template syntax.
Posterous announced their new Theming feature yesterday, which would be fine except that it’s not new. It’s the same one that Tumblr uses. In fact, it’s the same custom syntax that Tumblr wrote. No, really. Go take a look. In their announcement they use the term, ‘Tumblr-compatible’. I like to use the term, ‘theft’.
Anyway, this is stupid on many levels.
The theming format is not based on any standard, it was made up by Tumblr. This means that as Tumblr adds new theming variables and features (which happens nearly every week) Posterous will have to constantly update to keep compatibility. It has the same stench on it as what Palm did with iTunes compatibility.
Attempting to directly usurp a community’s users is desperate. It also publicly affirms that Posterous is Pepsi to Tumblr’s Coke.
The worst part though, is watching a decent competitor is such a small space (with so much room to innovate and grow) act so immature.
Keep it classy, Posterous.
Nick Caldwell is a professional web designer and unprofessional writer who thinks far too much about aesthetics, the contemporary sociopolitical condition, video games, Doctor Who, and spaceships. This is his Tumblelog.
