Customize My Tumblr Page

Tumblr, a popular micro-blogging platform, offers its users a variety of options for creating a completely custom blog. You can edit your basic profile information, add sidebar widgets, select a theme, manage the appearance of your page and manage other external services (such as Facebook and Twitter) linking to your Tumblr blog. You can change your blog dramatically or just tweak a few settings to optimize the blog to your liking.

1. Open your Tumblr dashboard in your Web browser and click the "Customize" link on the right sidebar. You can also browse your Tumblr blog directly and click the "Customize" button in the upper right corner of the browser window.
2. Click "Info." Under the Info heading, you can set the name and description of your blog. If you want to insert a custom widget on your sidebar, you can do this in the "Description" text box -- add HTML and other Web page code here. You can also upload your avatar/profile picture under this tab as well as set your username.
3. Click "Theme" to select the theme you want to use for your blog. You can change your theme at any time. The themes listed at the top are premium themes that you can purchase; below those are the free themes. If you have the HTML for a custom theme or you'd like to customize the HTML of your selected theme, click the "Custom HTML" button at the bottom of the window.
4. Select "Appearance" to change the appearance settings for your theme. The settings here will vary depending on your theme. Some themes will only allow you to change the colors; others may offer a considerable variety of appearance settings for colors, fonts, background image, font width, search settings and others.
6. Create pages for your Tumblr blog under the "Pages" setting. Choose a page name for your URL. You can create pages with custom content using the standard layout -- the same layout as your Tumblr page -- or you can create totally custom pages using the "Custom HTML" setting. With this setting, you need to add every element of the layout; merely adding text will create black text on a white background. You can also use pages to redirect to another page if, for instance, you want to create a page for a list of tagged pages. You can edit and delete pages from the same menu.
7. Use the "Services" tag to link your Tumblr account to your Facebook and Twitter accounts. You can use both, just one of these services or neither. If you have a Feedburner feed set up for your Tumblr account, you can enter that URL here. Tumblr allows you to import up to five RSS feeds into posts on your blog. This can be set up under "Services."
8. Change the commenting and submission settings under "Community." "Replies" has two options, allowing you to toggle whether or not people can reply to your posts. You can disable or enable users' being able to send you questions as well as the link title for your ask page and whether or not users can ask anonymously. Additionally, you can select whether users can submit posts, which is more appropriate for community blogs than personal blogs.
9. Manage the custom settings for your blog, including your RSS feed, adding custom CSS to your layout, configuring how many posts appear on a page, how links open in browsers and whether your blog will be listed in search engines.

Posted in: Blogging