After my recent switch to tumblr, I noticed something odd. Tumblr loads their controls into an iframe in the top right corner of the page. If you’re logged in, it will give you some options to follow, like, or reblog. If you’re not logged in, it will prompt you to join tumblr. It’s not very obtrusive, and I don’t mind promoting a product I like and I hope to see succeed. The only problem is when it’s loading, the background is white, until it flashes away when the iframe is loaded and then it is transparent. This looks horrible on every site that doesn’t have a white background. You can’t turn these controls off, so it’s always there. You can configure it not to show if the user is not logged in, however, it still has to load the iframe to check if the user is logged in, so you still see the white flash.

I’ve already fixed it on my site, but here’s what it looks like:

Fortunately, it’s fairly trivial to fix this with a little CSS and Javascript. First, in your CSS, set the #tumblr_controls to be hidden: #tumblr_controls { display: none; } This will make sure the iframe isn’t showing when the page loads. One caveat, currently “tumblr_controls” is the id of the iframe Tumblr adds. If they change that id, this fix won’t work. If you know this is the only iframe you’ll ever have on your blog, you could change the #tumblr_controls just to iframe.

Next with jQuery, you can easily tell when the iframe has finished loading, and only then show it, avoiding any flash of white: $(document).ready(function() { $('#tumblr_controls').load(function() { $(this).fadeIn(); }); });

Here is the fixed version (embedded for convenience though you could refresh and look at the top right corner of this page). This gets rid of the white flash and adds a nice little fade in animation.

I had some free time today, so I decided to switch my self-hosted Wordpress blog to Tumblr. I’ve been thinking about doing it for a while and since I want to try to post more in 2010, it seemed like the perfect time.

My main motivation behind switching is that I’ve always liked Tumblr, and have never really been a fan of Wordpress. Wordpress is a great product, but for some reason it never really clicked for me. For example, here’s a comparison of the Tumblr dashboard vs the Wordpress dashboard:


Tumblr is clean and simple, and Wordpress is a bit overwhelming and has too much going on. I’m not trying to knock Wordpress, it has gotten a lot better in the last few releases, but seems like it’s trying to be everything to everyone. Tumblr is much narrower in focus and just feels better to me. On top of that, it actually makes me want to post more, which is a feature you can’t underestimate the value of.

As an added bonus, I don’t have to worry about upgrading the software if there is a security problem, or worry about traffic spike taking down Wordpress, it’s all handled by Tumblr. It also means I don’t need MySQL anymore on my Slicehost VPS since the rest of my site is just static content, which is nice for a low-memory plan.

I’m still working out the kinks, but so far I’m pretty happy with it. Unfortunately, there was no easy way to import all my posts from Wordpress, so that had to be done manually. Luckily, I only had about 20 posts, and it didn’t take very long. The only thing I wish Tumblr had was a bit more control. For example, you can’t change how your archive page looks. Everyone’s is the same and it doesn’t match your theme, and I don’t particularly care for the layout. That and a few other little things bother me, it’s not perfect, but it’s definitely the best I’ve found so far.