Stuff I liked

Made a few updates to the site this morning. First of all, my Twitter sidebar feed is gone. I’ve recently protected my tweets because I’m sick of getting followed by spammers AND I want to be able to freely bitch about work and/or life in general without pissing a bunch of people off. If you want to read my updates, get a Twitter account and request to follow me. If you’re a real person who uses your Twitter account for legitimate purposes I won’t hesitate to approve you.

Second, I’ve replaced my Twitter feed with a new Tumblr feature, “likes”. The feature itself isn’t new, but the ability to display my likes on the site is. Essentially this will let me highlight stuff from the tumblrsphere I think is pretty cool but just not awesome enough to be added to my main blog. Also it will prevent the site from getting junked up with reblogged content from other users and will allow me to feature more of my original content and rants. It only displays 10 of my most recent like posts, so if you enjoy the stuff I’m posting there and don’t want to miss any of it you can always catch up at my dedicated likes page.

Ultimate Tumblr titles

I was browsing my stats earlier (which I track using Mint) and noticed that if people were browsing through reading the site, each “index page” of posts was logging with the same exact title - “Mr. Cave”. I began exploring ways to make the titles more descriptive, not only for this situation but also for those browsing search results, “tag pages”, etc. Here’s what I came up with:

Ultimate Tumblr titles

<title>
	{Title}
	{block:PreviousPage} / Page {CurrentPage} {/block:PreviousPage}
	{block:TagPage} / Posts tagged '{Tag}' 	{/block:TagPage}
	{block:SearchPage} / Search for '{SearchQuery}' {/block:SearchPage}
	{block:DayPage}	/ Archive from {Month} {DayOfMonth}, {Year}{/block:DayPage}
	{block:PostSummary} / {PostSummary}{/block:PostSummary}
</title>

The only section that might need explaining is the first one - {Block:PreviousPage}…{/Block:PreviousPage}. This will check if there is a “previous page” from the page we’re currently on. If not, we must be all the way at the beginning, i.e. we’re on the homepage (and thus don’t need to append “/ Page 1” to the title). Subsequent pages will register as having a “previous page” and will get “/ Page X” added to the end of the title.

This probably isn’t hugely important to many people, but it’s going to relieve some confusion for me when looking at the stats and will provide my visitors with some more descriptive page titles as they browse my site. Hope this might help those of you dealing with the same problem!

Edit: I didn’t search and see if there was anything like this out there before I posted it, but there is in fact a very similar post that’s been around for a while: Fix Yr Tumblr Template Titles.

Moving back…

OK so I switched to Wordpress a few weeks ago… and I’ve got to come back to Tumblr. WP has worked well for me in the past for various websites, but I’m not the type of blogger it so desperately wants me to be. The short, off-the-cuff style of tumbelogging just doesn’t work well with WP no matter how hard I try and force it.

Anyway, pardon the mess for the time being, I’ve got a new design coming soon, and all the posts made while I was on WP will be migrated over as soon as I get time.