In my opinion, a tumblelog is an excellent format for a personal website. It allows you to quickly post photos, conversations, video, text, quotes and links without a lot of overhead.
Tumblr is a great service that allows users a large amount of customization of the their tumblelogs for being a hosted service. Several sites have brilliantly integrated Tumblr into their static and dynamic sites for their blogging needs.
When redesigning my family website, I seriously considered this route. That is when I realized a few drawbacks on things I wanted available on the site.
- No built in search
- No built in commenting system
- Lack of archives
There are ways to get around the first two items.
Then after reading Ben Gray’s article on implementing the tumble-hybrid approach into the Texpattern CMS. I thought this would be a great format to develop and use. Allowing me to post some quick posts and lengthier content that allow comments and be easily accessed through archives as well.
“The whole point of a Tumble-Hybrid is to free yourself up from the over-produced weblog and experience more real-time life and living, which you will now log of course. Writing paragraphs upon paragraphs of pure punditry is time-consuming, distracting, and sucks the life and fun out of this medium. Besides, who are you writing to anyway?”
Shawn Anthony
With this said, FamilyGeek is now running a tweaked version of Sandbox. The display of the “tumbles” is primarily controlled by the CSS and the dynamically generated semantic markup of Sandbox. I did however, edit some of the core files for my needs. I plan on doing more edits to the php to remove things I don’t really need. It makes more sense to me than having so many display: none attributes in the CSS.
This not meant to be a tutorial on how to achieve this format on your blog. Others have already done that better than I can. Therefore, I am going to just point you in the right directions.
Adam has already written an excellent post on how use Sandbox to tumble your wordpress.
Shawn of Lo-Fi Tribe and Ben Gray of openswitch have both posted how-to articles on how to edit the core theme files to create a tumble-hybrid with WordPress. BTW, both of their sites look amazing too.
Plugins that can assist in the implementation of a tumble-hybird in WordPress:
- Tumblefeed reduces your feed into only one feed item per day. This single feed item includes all of the posts for that day.
- Quick Post allows you to quickly post text, images, photos, quotes, and videos to Wordpress.
Themes that are already built to provide the tumblelog look and feel:
You may also want to check out gelato, a CMS that is almost exactly like Tumblr. However, the same drawbacks I listed for Tumblr hold true for gelato.
26 Comments
Ooooo. I like how you’ve done that with Sandbox. Looks like Sandbox, by default, prints the category with each post? So then you just style each category as it comes?
Thanks Ben! Thanks for all the ideas you have given me over the last few weeks. With a new baby on the way, it should make FamilyGeek a whole lot more fun to update.
To answer your question, for each post Sandbox dynamically creates semantic classes that can used to style a post by author, category, date, etc.
For instance this post is contained by a
divthat Sandbox assigned the following class to:class="hentry p1 post publish author-will category-wordpress category-development category-articles category-design y2007 m08 d17 h11". Therefore, you can use parts of this class coupled with the specific item’s id or class to style it exactly like you want to.You can even style it one way on the home page using
body.homeand a different or default way on the post’s single page. I have that approach to style the asides category on this particular site design.However, I think using a modified Sandbox skeleton and the conditional php statements you outlined will be the best approach. I am working to implement some of those now.
Wow, I really like what you’ve done both with this site and with Family Geek. Truly, they’re beautiful.
I’m glad you found my little tutorial helpful, and of course, thanks for the mention!
Thanks for your compliments Adam C.! I think Rule of One is one of the best designs I have seen!
I have a little experience with Sandbox and was already working on this design when I found your article. However, you did a much better write up than I could have. Thanks for the tutorial. I still need to check out your slimmed down
functions.phpand see the changes you made.I forgot to mention the great work Scott has done at Transformatum utilizing this concept.
Hey, thanks for mentioning me!
You should check out Chryp, it’s a lightweight blogging engine, and it has a tumblelog plugin. It’s being rewritten by the developer right now, but soon it’ll be released and it’ll offer more tumblelog customization than Tumblr or Gelato. The developer is also working on a bookmarklet, which is something that has become invaluable in my tumblelogging experience.
Chyrp: http://chyrp.net/faq/
Please feel free to add any WordPress tumblelog info to the Tumblepedia.
Tumblepedia: http://tumblepedia.net/
No problem Cameron. Your site has even changed since I saw it the other night. Looks great. I like how you have integrated Tumblr for your life stream and TXP for your lengthy articles.
Chyrp looks like it might be promising. I was somewhat disappointed by Gelato, because for being a self-hosted site, there isn’t a whole lot of functionality that differs from Tumblr’s hosted service.
Thanks for the info.
I tend to agree with you about Gelato. I installed it on my test site to play around with it and from what I could tell it was exactly the same as Tumblr but, like you said, self-hosted. But since Tumblr has domain mapping, Gelato really looses all appeal for me.
OT: I forgot how great Sandbox is! It’s good to be back with WP.
Exactly. I installed Gelato locally and saw no real point in it. If I wanted that I can use Tumblr and not have to worry about upgrades, etc.
Sandbox is awesome. Glad to have you back on WP. However, I still intend on really trying out TXP. Just got to get this site and FamilyGeek up to par.
TXP is a great CMS. I know that I’ve got at least 2 clients in the pipe that I’m going to highly recommend TXP to for their sites. But when it comes to personal blogging, WP is a more natural fit.
Hey, if you want to pop some suggestions into Chyrp feel free to do so at the forums. I haven’t written the new Tumblelog plugin yet, as I’m still getting all the core functionality finalized. I may change a few things from the previous Chyrp. If you’re curious to see how the Tumblelog plugin functioned before the recode, I have the old Chyrp uploaded here (log in with demo/demo).
(Also, sorry if I sound kinda boring/spammish, it’s 4 AM, I need some sleep. :P)
I like tumblelogs and i am not moving to tumblr or gelato because the drawbacks you’ve already listed.
I like the tumble-hybrid solution with WP and Sandbox. But i have a question: what will you do with your tumble-hybrid when you upgrade to WP 2.3?
Thank you.
Hello federicosanchez - I am not sure what you mean. The site has already been upgraded to WP 2.3. I am working on a new theme for the site and hope to have it finished next week. However, there aren’t any issues that I have found with the current theme and WP 2.3.
I think Ben in his tutorial wrote you have to create one category for each kind of post (videos, photos, thoughts, conversations, etc.) and I read WP 2.3 don’t have categories, only tags. My English sucks, sorry.
The current theme here is running the same way. Each category is styled differently using CSS. But, WordPress 2.3 does still have categories. They have now added support for tagging.
WP2.3 still has categories. A Sandbox style tumblelog still works in 2.3.
My mistake then. Thank you so much.
No worries Federico. Thanks for your comments.
Hi Will, I came across this article while searching for WordPress-powered tumblelogs. Wow I never realised the tumblelog was catching on as a format, there are so many entries around on it. New micro-blogging tools like Twitter and Jaiku have probably helped with awareness.
I’m hoping WordPress will integrate a tumblelog interface sometime in the future, I think it was mentioned somewhere in their forums that they’d consider it if it was popular enough. Tumblr is just too unreliable and the lack of commenting is a bummer. I think lack of interaction with readers shouldn’t characterise tumblelogging, it’s more the short-form format of the posts that matters.
Anyway, I myself have ported my Tumblr page onto WordPress and the K2 mod. Being back on WordPress has really made me realise how much functionality I’ve missed. A tumblelog interface that allows faster posting would be the icing on the cake.
By the way, to add to my previous comment, WordPress tumbleloggers might be interested in the Quick Post plugin and the WordPressDash widget (for Macs).
Hello weisheng. I love your WordPress tumble-hybrid design. The site looks great.
I agree with you thoughts on wanting to stick with WordPress. There are just so many features already built-in and the ability to add even more with plugins that it is hard to give WordPress up for a hosted service. However, I think if davidville makes some of the updates to Tumblr that users are asking for it will be a great publishing platform too.
I have tried the Quick Post plugin on two different sites and it never worked correctly. Every time I used it, the post was duplicated. So, I would have to always go into the admin and delete one of the posts. I also read that some users are having issues with it working with WP 2.3. I just use the regular built in “Press it” link from the WP admin. I will take a look at the widget you mentioned though.
Yeah, I’m afraid I jumped the gun a little there, the plugin is broken in WP 2.3 at the moment. For Mac users the widget is great though, I post through it all the time now. Windows users will have to look out for a Vista sidebar or Yahoo widget.
Weisheng - The WordPress Dash Widget doesn’t allow for the tagging available in WP 2.3 does it?
You’re right in that it doesn’t support adding tags of any form (native or UTW). However that doesn’t really come into the picture for me because I don’t tag my posts. I find tagging too tedious and I tend to tag almost every damn word in my post! Also, I don’t include archives or categories on my tumblelog so tags aren’t of much use for users. Those are more blog features, I prefer to keep the tumblelog as simplistic as possible.
It’s funny I came across your post, because I have the same feelings as you do about tumblelogs…they are simple which is great but they lack basic features like commenting. That’s why I have decided to throw my OSS hat into the ring and design a dead simple self-hosted tumblelog system.
The first post regarding it can be found over here: http://projects.brianbommarito.net/blog/2007/10/12/self-hosted-tumblelog/
And if you want to give it a try, let me know and I will give you advance notice of the versions as they hit.
Hello Brian. Thanks for sharing your adventure in starting to build you own tumbling CMS. I prefer to use the solutions readily available at the moment. Good luck with it!
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