One of the things I’ve been trying to do for a while is blend a Tumblr-style blog and a regular WordPress blog.
If you haven’t seen it yet, Tumblr is a short-form blog service designed for you to post single bursts of information in one hit easily.
Imagine if you saw a poster and you just suddenly wanted to put that online for everyone to see. You’re out and about with your phone and web savvy person that you are decides you’d like to take a picture of it and post it online for the world to see. You can always put it to Twitter and use a service like TwitPic or YFrog, or you can put it to your own site.
Tumblr is that sort of setup.
WordPress can do that too, but most of the templates you see are designed to show words better than images. There are some truly excellent Photoblog templates out there, including the stuff GraphPaperPress do and the wonderful (and free) Duotone theme, but these are generally designed for photos or galleries.
I wanted something that would let me post a combination of words and images, a showcase of what was going through my mind, so to speak.
For months, I’ve experimented with an MU installation that housed three blogs: one for words, one for Tumblr-style blogs, and one that collected the best of both and published it in a collected place. That “collected place” would have been my main domain.
However, the main problem I had come across was that you’d have to login individually. Despite WordPress MU (and WP3 with the integrated MU core) having a unified login setup, it was still a pain in the ass.
Justin Marcus’s “New York, New York” is an excellent theme, and it suited my needs quite well. I found it the other day and knew instantly how I wanted to modify it. He’s got some great code there, but I have a few things I’ve done differently…. as you’ll see in the coming post.