Tag Archives: Tumblr

There are a few blogs, such as Daring Fireball and Digging into WordPress, that have microblog-style “link” items interspersed with ordinary posts. The post title links off-site instead of to a permalink page, and a more compact styling is usually used. Basically, like Tumblr does it.

Digging into WordPress has a neat guide to doing this yourself in WordPress, if you don’t mind editing your theme files and working with a bit of PHP.

…the key difference between the two types of posts: regular post titles link to the single-view of the post, but Link post titles link to the URL of an external resource (i.e., whatever awesome thing you’re sharing with your visitors). This makes it super-easy to share links via true “Tumblr-style” Link posts.

I really like the idea of Daring Fireball-style link posts, though they aren’t necessary an ideal feature for every blog. They would be great for niche news blogs, for referring people to stories broken by another website, without writing a fluff piece that doesn’t really add to the story.

Tumblr Links with Post Formats [Digging into WordPress]

A lot of people enjoy using the easy to use Tumblr service as a way to save and share links, quotes, videos, pictures, etc.. These “tumbleblogs,” as they are called, are a neat idea. It’s a similar concept to Twitter, posting quick updates instead of full-length blog posts. Out of the box, WordPress can be (and is) used in this manner. You don’t get the easy-to-use multimedia posting interface like Tumblr, though. Or the different styling for each type of post, either.

WordPress 3.0 has improved support for custom post types, which would make it very easy for someone to build Tumblr-like functionality into WordPress by way of a plugin.

Here’s a business idea for anyone enterprising enough to make it happen: Build a plugin that extends WordPress with Tumblr-style functionality. Add hooks and functions that themes could take advantage of. Give the plugin away for free, licensed under the GPL of course. Once that’s out of the way, you build a business selling themes that make use of the plugin. The plugin provides the framework, and then you can sell some low-cost themes that utilize the framework.