Patrick Hanlon’s response to my entry on tumblelogs. I agree with everything he says.

When I wrote the piece, I only briefly mentioned specific services, because I was more interested in the mindset than the actual implementation — I’m currently running this site on Tumblr, which is definitely a great service.

See it on GitHub.

The process took about two hours, including updating WordPress and fixing a configuration issue. There is some slight mismatch between the two, largely due to platform differences, but I was able to simply copy and paste a good deal of the code.

Issues

• Is there a template tag to check if next/previous pagination will be generated? I don’t want to have unnecessary markup rendered. Tumblr allows me to do this by wrapping all my pagination code in {block:Pagination}…{/block:Pagination} tags, and the next/previous links in {block:NextPage}…{NextPage}…{/block:NextPage}. WordPress only seems to provide a way to generate the links directly with next_posts_link.
• I’m unclear on exactly how to set up archives. The instructions in the Codex seem to be a version behind.
• Bizarrely, the page renders differently when I use local CSS, even though it’s exactly the same as the remote copy I use with Tumblr. For now the style.css file is present simply because it’s required to give metadata.

Google recently introduced a way to tell their crawler which address variant you want indexed:

Now, you can simply add this <link> tag to specify your preferred version:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish" />

This is very simple to set up with Tumblr. Go to the customization page, and just before the </head>, add the following code:

{block:PermalinkPage}<link rel='canonical'
      href='{Permalink}'>{/block:PermalinkPage}

This will automatically add the <link> element on pages for individual entries. Index pages (i.e. pages that can have pagination links) will just get a blank line.

For the past day, I was unable to post here, or use Tumblr at all, because I locked myself out. This was a result of several actions on my part:

• I recently began moving some accounts to use an email address at this domain (ratafia.info) rather than Gmail’s.
• I use 1Password pretty heavily, so most of my logins are no longer in my memory.
• There are few sites that don’t use cookies to keep users logged in.
• The other night I installed GlimmerBlocker and wiped my browser to get rid of tracking cookies and empty my browser history. (More on this subject in another post, perhaps.)
• I make mistakes.

Put together, this means that when I changed my Tumblr login to use the new email address, I only went halfway — moving it from @gmail.com to @ratafia.com instead of @ratafia.info. When I deleted my cookies, I was, naturally, logged out of Tumblr. When I tried to use 1Password to log in, it had the wrong email address.

After several hours of frustration, I emailed Tumblr support asking what email address I was actually supposed to be using. I didn’t have high hopes for a response, because that definitely looks like an attempt at social engineering. Nevertheless, this morning I got a response, discovered my error in the email changeover, and am now back in (and with all the login information corrected).

It’s certainly an unusual feeling to be locked out of one’s own website; it’s one I will hopefully avoid in the future.

Another administrative note: I have enabled support for comments, by way of Disqus. This is somewhat experimental; if the system proves troublesome or invites spam I will remove it.

The choice is somewhat haphazard, I’ll admit — I’ve not yet used Disqus on another site, and I’ve become hesitant about relying on Web 2.0-type services. Despite this, I thought I’d give them a try. The system has been spreading across various blogs that I think are fairly reliable, and they apparently provide for full data export. The latter is the more important; I wouldn’t have chosen them without such an option.

I’ve tried to integrate it with the design as best I can, and it looks okay. There is some trouble in that the form itself is rendered inside an <iframe>, meaning that I can’t change it away from a glaring white background.

Give it a try and let me know if there are any problems!

A brief note to mention that I’ve put up the theme’s beginnings. It’s almost unstyled right now; colors are present, and a few of my other design ideas, but there’s a lot of work left to do. Forgive the clutter as I work out what I’m doing.

I’ve also moved the feed over to FeedBurner. It gives a little separation from Tumblr, but mostly I did it for Atom support.

Here’s a screenshot for posterity.

Today I began work on a new Tumblr theme. I decided I’d start keeping everything related to the blog in GitHub, and develop ‘live’ by pushing CSS updates and working in the Tumblr editor. Great idea, but there’s a problem: trying to load the CSS file doesn’t work right. Most of the time there’s a delay of at least a minute before it loads, even when it’s already in my browser cache. In my cursory search I wasn’t able to find any mention by GitHub for or against using it as a file server. They evidently support it in some capacity since they launched ‘pages’; I may try to set up the needed files as a branch of some sort inside my page repository and see if I can fix it that way. It’d give me a much shorter URL, if nothing else!

So I decided I’d poke around to see if my domain registrar offered anything useful. Turns out I get some free hosting and I can add subdomains and so on, but at the moment they don’t seem to be working. It could be a DNS propagation thing.

While I was involved with that, I discovered I also have a free email address for my domain. With a little fiddling I got that set up and now it’s a transparent alias for my previous primary address at Gmail; everything directed to it is automatically forwarded, and I can easily send as it via Gmail’s web interface or Mail.app.

Now there’s the bother of gradually changing my email address across dozens of websites… but at least it’ll be done if I ever move off Gmail.