Codes by Laighlin
q. How do I install a theme in the first place?
Go to your blog, click “edit theme” in the top right corner, click “edit html” in the customize page that comes up. replace everything in there with the code provided in the theme post. If you want to retain the default values from my theme previews, here’s how to do a clean install.
(note: if your theme looks completely broken even after a clean install, check to see if there’s anything in the “custom css” section under advanced options, because that doesn’t get cleared out when you replace the html.)
q. Do you take theme commissions?
If the updates section in my sidebar says commissions are open, then yes! Please read the terms and conditions linked under “commissions” before messaging me about this. If no such page exists at the moment, then I’m not currently open for hire.
q. Will you ever make a theme that has _____?
I code mostly as a self-indulgent hobby, so if a feature is well beyond my current capabilities or just strikes me as a bad idea, chances are it won’t find its way into my themes. Here’s some design elements i’m not interested in:
- <250px post widths in single-column themes (straight up unnecessary and inaccessible, makes even images and videos difficult to see)
- enormous image headers that aren’t restricted to the landing page and require you to scroll an entire page’s worth to find the content (*cough* optica *cough*
- for that matter, anything that makes it such that the content - in this case, the actual blog posts - isn’t immediately visible on loading the page. i don’t know how many people on here use statcounter but you’d be surprised at the number of hits one receives on average from people who’re there for a specific page or post, not to aimlessly look around your blog, for people like those the extra work required to find what they actually want is both off-putting and a waste of time.
- literally just stripping a theme down to its barest essentials and calling the resulting uncreative inflexible garbage “minimalism”
- anything that compels you to upload 3+ images to not look incomplete. there are exceptions to this bias of mine - such as one of my personal favorite themes on here - but as a general rule, if a theme heavily relies on graphics for its full effect then it probably needs some reworking.
- font sizes in the vicinity of 8-10px. bitmap/pixel fonts that look like shit in larger sizes. very small text elements that do a poor job of accommodating large fonts. low contrast between text and background. …you get the picture; if it interferes with readability i hate it already.
- layouts with a lot of different content elements (updates tab, several different categories of links, more than three columns of navigable shit) such as the ones commonly used by resource or rph blogs. nothing against them - my variously disordered and disabled ass just can’t focus on that many things at once.
- infinite scroll.
things i do want to incorporate into my themes:
- multiple columns at least once, just to see how masonry works
- topbar navigation. A+ stuff
- more jquery!
q. I’m using a theme with built-in like and reblog buttons but I can’t get the like buttons to work.
You can’t like posts on your own blog. Tumblr doesn’t let you do it; there is nothing I can do to change that. Try using a different account to like your posts and it should work just fine.
q. A theme of yours says I can add unlimited custom links, but I see no text fields for me to add any links at all. The hell?
[ID: A screenshot of the top right corner of Tumblr’s custom page editor, where an option marked “Show a link to this page” is currently toggled off.]
[ID: Screenshot of the same area as above, but with the option now turned on, giving the user a space to specify the title to the link.]
q. But that only works if i’m linking to a page on my own blog. What I want to link to a tag/someone else’s blog/an external domain, such as twitter?
[ID: Screenshot of the top left corner of Tumblr’s custom page editor, where a drop-down menu currently has “Standard layout” selected.]
[ID: Screenshot of the same area as above, but with the active option now set to “Redirect”. A text field appears where the user can input the destination URL. In this instance, it has been set to redirect from a blog’s /thm page to /tagged/themes.]
^that works for anything, not just tags
q. Why make adding links so complicated instead of just putting text fields in the code?
every theme in tumblr’s collection of default themes uses this feature. it’s more efficient, and draws on tumblr’s own API to accomplish something i’d have to write 4-5x the amount of code to do using the “link 1 goes here/link 1 url goes here” method. it’s not an issue of being lazy, it’s just semantically better and makes more sense.
there’s no limit to the number of pages you can make per blog, and theme design permitting, there shouldn’t be a hard-coded limit to the number of links you can show either. it’s not difficult to add links this way; everybody using a default theme does it without getting lost, it’s just inexplicably rare to see in custom themes.