Introducing My New Redesigned Tumblr Blog!

My year old, bright blue green, Marco-approved Tumblr theme has been replaced by my brand-new theme!

The first thing you’ll notice is the cool noise pattern, zoomed up to 800% so it looks more like random tiles than noise. I then put a dark blue gradient up top to give it more of an atmospheric look. One thing I learned in the process is that CSS3 multiple-background support is miserable even in WebKit once you try to give any background different repeat or position settings than the others.

The icons have been redone using Drew Wilson’s excellent Pictos Icons. There are new icons on the right side of each post that let you reblog, tweet and share on Facebook. These are there as tools for the user, not attempts to boost my hitcount or anything like that, so I made them subtle and unobtrusive. These are buttons I wish were on other blogs when I see something I want to share.

If you want to add reblogging links to your Tumblr theme, just add this:¹

<a href="http://tmv.proto.jp/reblog.php?post_url={Permalink}" class="share-rb" alt="Reblog">Reblog</a>

The typography has been redone. The three most readable blogs I’ve found are Daring Fireball, Cameron Moll, and Shawn Blanc. They all have a similar approach, and I wanted to duplicate that without outright stealing it. To do that, I grabbed the Droid Sans fonts from the Google Font Directory. Now I have nice, readable text that still stands apart from the others.

And, finally, I’ve put in proper reblogging support. Now, instead of me having to type “(via randomblog)” every time I reblog someone, a bar shows up at the bottom of each post I reblog. That’ll leave some oddly formatted entries from the past year, but progress requires sacrifice. Or something like that.

After the mistakes I made with the public Endurance theme, it’s good to know that I can still make an awesome Tumblr theme. Feel free to email, tweet or Tumblr message me with any questions, comments or ideas!