Your Tumblr is broken. Fix it
Do you know at least one company that hosts their blog on Tumblr with a domain like blog.myawesomestartup.com, because doing that is easy and fast and there is no reason why you shouldn’t, at least to start with? Of course you do!
Now, do you know at least one company that has their blog logo point to *drum roll* blog.startup.com? As in, if you click on their name or logo you get a circular reference to their blog, with no way to get out? Yeah, like two out of every three company do this insanity. It doesn’t just bother me, it infuriates me.
Frankly, I don’t care if your conversion from blog to the website sucks. I’d leave it to Dave McClure to tell you that you’re an idiot, from the business point of view. What I care for is MY experience as an end user.
Sometimes, when I read an interesting post on somebody’s blog, I actually want to check out their product. I get curious and I want to find out more about the awesome people that wrote what I read, or maybe to learn more about their product, or where they are from … whatever it is, my first reaction is to click on the logo and to get to their site, where more juicy information is hiding. When I don’t get that in 1-click, I get mad. How could you be so ignorant? Why are you expecting me to decipher your url and to type it into the browser? Why should I?
You just captured my attention and then you punched me in the face! So, once and for all, here is how you fix this problem on Tumblr.
1- Go to Tumblr.com and login. 2- Now, go to your blog. When it fully loads, click on the "Customize" icon in the top -right corner. You should see an editor load on the left.
3- Click "edit html"
4- Find markup that says "{block:IfLogoInTopBar}"
5- Right above that line, insert your own logo.Here's how I did it for blog.scoutzie.com
<h1 class="blog-title"> <a href="http://www.scoutzie.com/" title="Scoutzie.com" class="scoutzie-logo-link"> Scoutzie </a> • <a href="/">blog</a> </h1>
[update: tnx to ghiculescu on HN for pointing this out] If you are using the original Tumblr theme, {ifLogoInTopBar} is apparently not present. Try looking for {block:IfShowBlogTitle}
6- Save!
7- Make sure "Logo in Top bar" option is unset, and you are all done!
Now, was that so hard, to make your users’ experience so much better?
This fix takes two minutes and you there is no excuse as to why you shouldn’t take two minutes out of your busy schedule to fix this.
All of you who have a Tumblr blog do the wrong thing, please for the love of your users, go fix this now.
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