Review: Finding A WordPress Theme For A Tumblr/Tumblelog -Style Blog

Summary: If you’re exporting your blog from Tumblr to WordPress and want a Tumblr style theme, I recommend Nucleare or Twenty Fifteen.

I’ve recently helped export some blogs off tumblr to a WordPress installation. Tumblr is a great blogging platform – it’s terrific for quickly posting those random thoughts, code samples, and images one sees across the course of the day. But WordPress is a better long term solution, especially for blogs that are quickly growing.

The hardest part of exporting a Tumblr site to WordPress is finding a theme that replicates the clean, neat design of Tumblr. I used to recommend a theme called Fast Blog ($44 from ThemeForest). Unfortunately, the theme is no longer available and in any event hasn’t been updated in years.

The former Fast Blog theme for sale at ThemeForest.com, no longer available as I type this blog post. Before it was removed from sales, it had 2,547 purchases.

A friend of mine recommends Annina, which uses a big left navigation bar with a Pinterest-style multiple stacked boxes for each blog post:

Annina is a good, basic theme that is fantastic for mobile devices: it’s easy for the navigation bar and post “boxes” to rearrange themselves to fit different mobile (tablet/phone) sized screens – a lot of blogs and sites are rearranging themselves to fit this aesthetic to earn those mobile views.

The basic version of Annina is free, but there is a paid version of Annina that unlocks additional features. If you’re a new blogger, the free version of Annina is more than enough.

Annina is a good theme, but my major complaint is that I want whole blog posts to show on the blog’s main page, not just the excerpt that Annina shows – just like Tumblr does.

My Picks

If you’re exporting a Tumblr website to WordPress and need a similar theme, I recommend either Twenty Fifteen or Nucleare.

Why Nucleare? It’s a crisp, clean theme that echoes the general lines of Tumblr, yet offers a reasonable amount of customizability.

A sample of the Nucleare theme.

Perhaps my only complaint with Nucleare is the tons of wasted space around the title section and the inability to set the page width (I think it’s too wide on desktop displays). Otherwise, it’s a terrific theme that replicates the Tumblr experience.

In the Appearance > Customize section of WordPress admin, you can change the theme colors and (even more importantly in my view) change how posts are shown on the main page: either excerpt or the full post:

The color picker in the Colors section of the theme customizer.
Selecting to show full post or post excerpt in the blog main page.

Another theme I would recommend is Twenty Fifteen. It’s the WordPress default theme from 2015, but it’s been updated by the WordPress folks to maintain good SEO and mobile performance. For the screenshot below, the only change I made was to alter the navigation bar background color to blue (hex code #1287a8; default for the theme is to leave it white).

An example view of the Twenty Fifteen theme on desktop.
Screenshot of the same site on a mobile device.

Perhaps my only complaint with the Twenty Fifteen theme is that it includes a lot of padding and margin space around posts. I may end up cutting down that space using additional CSS.

So bottom line: Use Nucleare or Twenty Fifteen for those Tumblr blogs moving to WordPress. Both themes are free and have excellent defaults, along with good customization out of the box.

Lottery Error Message & Consultant Thoughts On Food

I love collecting samples of error messages, especially branded error messages. Today’s sample comes from the Illinois Lottery website – or to be more exact, their iOS app which frames a web page:

A screenshot of the Illinois Lottery iOS app, showing an error page. I quite like the image of an unplugged power cord to depict an error.
A screenshot of the Illinois Lottery iOS app, showing an error page. I quite like the image of an unplugged power cord to depict an error.

As I’ve discussed before, I’ve spent quite a few years as a consultant – while working as a consultant, I loved staying at DoubleTree hotels: their prices were fair, with good amenities targeted towards business travelers. That’s why I’m pleased to see that DoubleTree recently published their recipe for cookies – they were always a tasty treat when checking in.

Speaking of recipes, I’m also pleased to note that Chipotle published their recipe for guacamole. I enjoy eating at Chipotle when I travel: it’s a good, healthy helping of food in an easily portable burrito.

Chipotle tweet showing their recipe for guacamole.

Tumblr Sale

News came out recently that Verizon’s Oath unit (which is partly made up of Yahoo’s web assets) sold Tumblr to Automattic (they develop WordPress and run WordPress.com) for $3 million.

Obviously, this is a big drop from Yahoo’s original $1+ billion purchase, but there’s still quite a lot of value to be salvaged from Tumblr. This HN discussion comments that Tumblr is still receiving 2.5+ billion page views per month, which doesn’t even include their mobile views. I see a lot of articles moaning about Tumblr’s problems, but it is still a powerful brand and I’m quite surprised another company didn’t buy it up – $3 million is a firesale price.

Of all the articles discussing Tumblr’s sale, I like this one the best: a post from one of VCs who originally invested in Tumblr. Regardless of what happens to Tumblr, I think it will be remembered as one of the first places to easily and quickly share thoughts, a place which made it easy to create communities and fandoms, and a surprisingly upbeat and positive place compared to other social media sites.

Using The Good Parts Of AWS

There was a fascinating Twitter thread on how to use the “good” parts of AWS, from an ex-AWS engineer:
https://twitter.com/dvassallo/status/1154516910265884672 . Click to expand the below image.

Using the good parts of AWS, from a former AWS engineer.

Bottom line: He recommends building your services to use AWS EC2, DynamoDB, etc but avoiding abstractions such as Lambda and API Gateway. There’s an interesting discussion on this thread on HN:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20545561 .

Cutting More Space Off The Twenty Seventeen WordPress Theme

What drives me crazy about the WordPress Twenty Seventeen theme is that it’s almost the perfect starting theme, but it wastes so much screen real estate – especially in the header.

Here’s CSS to shave off space and makes the header a lot less “aggressive” looking:

div.custom-header {
	text-transform: lowercase;
}

div.site-branding {
	padding-top: 1em;
	padding-bottom: 1em;
	padding-left: 2em;
	padding-right: 2em;
}

h1.site-title {
	text-transform: lowercase;
}

WordPress Twenty Seventeen Theme Page Spacing

I think the WordPress Twenty Seventeen theme is pretty close to the ideal starter WP template – it’s simple yet looks very nice, especially if there’s a nice header image.

One of the major annoyances with using the theme is that there’s so much empty space in a default page. For example, here’s how my /about page looked like with just the default CSS (note how small the “ABOUT” text is, and it’s a H1 heading!):

Picture of unstyled

I added the following custom CSS to help reduce the space and slightly increase the size of the H1 text:

h1.entry-title {
	font-size: large !important;
	font-weight: bolder !important;
}

header.entry-header {
	padding: 0 !important;
	margin: 0 !important;
}

div#content.site-content {
	padding-top: 1em !important;
}

IBM Watson Natural Language Understanding

I was fiddling with code that worked with IBM Watson’s Natural Language Understanding API, and kept getting the following error:

{
    "error": "invalid request: content is empty",
    "code": 400
}

What happened is that I was calling out to IBM using the following requests Python code (post_data represents a Python object being encoded to JSON):

post_data_string = json.dumps(post_data)
requests.post(endpoint, data=post_data_string, timeout=45, auth=(ibm_user, ibm_pass))

However, it seems that the API insists on having the correct request content type set; i.e. you must set Content-Type: application/json for the IBM Watson servers to notice there is a data body in the POST request. I fixed it by using the json parameter – the requests library for Python automatically inserts the application/json content type when this parameter is used. If you use a different language, you’ll need to set the proper content type in the language’s preferred manner.

requests.post(endpoint, json=post_data, timeout=45, auth=(ibm_user, ibm_pass))

Why I Love NewsBlur – Folder RSS

After the closure of Google Reader – which I was a big fan of – I moved all of my RSS feeds to NewsBlur. One of the reasons I moved to NewsBlur is that it has a full API and is very easy to interface with!

For instance, folder feeds are available and don’t require authentication, making it easy for an app to merge multiple RSS feeds and treat them as one. For example: in NewsBlur, I’ve created a folder called economy and set up multiple feeds (New York Times, Forbes, Washington Post Business) underneath that folder, like so:

A Newsblur folder containing multiple feeds.
A Newsblur folder containing multiple feeds.

Right clicking the folder name and clicking folder settings pops up the folder settings tab. The URLs listed in the Feed Address section return a RSS list with all of the items from the feeds combined into a single feed. Even better: the URL supplied doesn’t require authentication, so an application can read it instead of having to poll 5 separate RSS feeds.

Newsblur folder settings screenshot.

Disney Waiting Page

I like to collect examples of error pages, but this is slightly different. When I was browsing Disney.com, I was shown the below page asking me to wait until the request could be completed.

Notice the stylized Space Mountain image in the middle, which helps to customize and personalize the page to the Disney branding. This is a good page to use as a template if you need to build a similar long-waiting page.

Screenshot of a Disney page asking the user to wait while a long-running request executes.
Screenshot of a Disney page asking the user to wait while a long-running request executes.
A close-up of the stylized Space Mountain image, which helps to brand the page with the Disney theme.
A close-up of the stylized Space Mountain image, which helps to brand the page with the Disney theme.