I recently added Disqus comments to my Tumblr, so that anyone can make quick comments on my posts without having to formally reblog the post. Or otherwise use Tumblr at all. This further illustrated the main problem with my tumblr: it totally sucks if you aren’t reading my posts through your dashboard. Well, the RSS feed might be good. But anyway, people visiting for the first time didn’t have a great experience. It didn’t look good, it was a pain to change things, and so on. I was always apologizing whenever I linked someone to it.

It was using a pretty lame default theme that was available when I first started this whole thing more than two years ago. When I was trying to add Disqus comments, had to futz around in the HTML in order to add the comments section, and even then, it looked weird. But the guide I had bookmarked on getting Disqus on tumblr, aside from highlighting some useful stuff like Akismet, also mentioned that “modern” themes have built-in support for Disqus.

In other words, it was time to move on.

I eventually settled on the theme Effector, which looks relatively nice and has support for a huge amount of stuff. It has a checkbox for infinite scrolling, which I had previously enabled with some JavaScript I found online. It has Disqus support, obviously. It has a nice little section where it links to various social networks. It has a floating bar thing for my title and search box and stuff. All in all, it’s a huge improvement. The one thing I don’t really like is the flat colouring used in music posts, but I think what I have now is kind of ok.

Stuff I changed:

• I added some custom CSS, which Effector has a box for, to center headers in my posts (example)
• Only had to edit the HTML once, to put back the awesome search box from Swiftype - it even scrolls down the page correctly! I can also see the searches people make in real-time, so I know that literally no one has used my search box except for me. But it’s really, really good at finding things - whereas the default tumblr search box is literally useless.
• Added the silly little floating Black Coat Network icon in the bottom left that currently does nothing, as a sign of support for a good friend
• I put my Tumblr tag cloud back and found out that it can be ordered by frequency instead of recency. I decided to limit it to my 10 most popular tags, as well, because it took up a lot of space when I had it pasted into my description box. Instead, I made a page that shows the full tag cloud in case anyone wants to see.
• I lied about only editing the HTML once - I realized having the tag cloud in my description was dumb, and so I found out how separators were done in my theme and made one to create a section titled “popular tags” . It looks nice, I think!

I’ve got a few things I’d still like to take care of, though:

• Adding some new icons to link to my GoodReads profile, my AnimePlanet profile, and my Pocket archive (aka Read It Later aka the name I prefer to use because it’s more recognizable) - this would make my contact page obselete
• I might like to move the “control buttons” for each post to the top, instead of the bottom - these are the buttons for getting a direct link to a post, liking a post, etc.
• Adding syntax highlighting for any code snippets I care to post, because why not? I’ve got an old Xah Lee post hanging around for hard-coding it into the HTML, but I’m also checking out highlight.js and sunlight.js. Highlight support more languages, and seems to support them better, as well as having more theme options (I’ve become partial to Monokai). Meanwhile, Sunlight has line numbers (but it seems an older branch of Highlight has this too) and seems to have a pretty good architecture. Realistically, they’re probably both just as good. To implement, I think I just need to get the JavaScript file and upload it to tumblr and then just run the script by putting a < script > block in my description.

Anyway, there’s a bunch of stuff you can fiddle with if you haven’t visited the actual web page in a while. Or add to your own tumblr, if you like. Or any website, I assume, if that’s how you roll. Swiftype’s indexing and searching is really quite nice, and it’s free if you’re not sucking up their bandwidth. And automatic syntax highlighting is pretty rad if you’re going to post code snippets. So yeah, if you like the sounds of that, go check them out and I’ll be happy and stuff.

edit, five minutes later: I uploaded the required JavaScript file and the Monokai theme for highlight.js, but unfortunately it looks quite ugly. Turns out none of the themes with dark backgrounds look good on my current theme. So I’ve gone with the Arta theme because it kind of fits with the rest of my current colour scheme. You can see it all in action at this unlisted page, if you’re curious. It was pretty easy to install, actually, though I have no idea if it might have averse effects on page loading…