I’ve made a new Tumblr blog. It’s called JoiPad and its a gallery of great iPad games. Check it out if you’ve got a chance.

I like working with Tumblr. It’s so super easy to update, that it really works great for ultra simple websites like a personal blog or a picture gallery.

As much as I like Wordpress, it can feel a little bloated - it’s better suited for giant multi-author websites and is maturing into its own little content management system. Its fab, but Tumblr fills that quick and simple gap that Wordpress is slightly lacking.

Tumblr has some pretty great options for editing themes, too. It’s a million miles from what Wordpress can achieve, but its still powerful. Take a look at JoiPad - you might not realise it, but making the iPad border fit around both a landscape and a portrait game was a real hassle.

My first solution was to use the “Photo” publishing tool for landscape games, and the “Link” tool for portrait games - with a different set of images and variables for both. The only problem was that portrait games looked super messy and unprofessional in the Tumblr feed and the RSS.

So I had a good long think and figured it out. Posts about landscape games have the tag “land” and posts about portrait ones have the tag “port”, then when the theme goes to get the variables for the photo, it sees “<div class=”{Tag}frame”>”, and will get different images, styles and sizes if its port or land.

If you didn’t follow that, just know that its a cheeky hack. Wordpress has this sort of stuff built in with custom fields, but Tumblr doesn’t. 

Anyway, I just wanted to share some of my theme building escapades, as interesting as that sounds. Sorry for not updating the blog since failing one a day. I do intend to keep writing here, it was just nice to have a break.

See ya.