

Your Tumblr is broken. Fix it. - kirillzubovsky
https://medium.com/startup-shenanigans/cc1a60ea7bf2

======
vlokshin
While this solves the problem of getting "stuck" in the blog, you can do a lot
more than just a link back to your homepage

Tumblr customization isn't that difficult -- and I think people with a basic
understanding of HTML/CSS should be able to figure out how to do something
like this.

A large number of sites (including ours) have a top nav.

We changed the whole top nav on our tumblr blog to look just like the rest of
the site. The user can also access any part of our site this way.

Take a look:

<http://darwinapps.com/> <http://blog.darwinapps.com/>

~~~
minouye
Just a heads up that this is what your blog looks like in mobile Safari:

<http://imgur.com/HpIUKbL>

Posting this mainly because I hadn't realized how much Tumblr customizes their
mobile experience--not sure what a good solution to this is if a sizable
percentage of your readers are on iOS.

~~~
vlokshin
Thanks! I know tumlr has its own iPhone version that overrides default (if you
leave it as so in settings), but we hadn't given much thought to customizing
it.

A surprisingly low amount (5%) of our readers are on iOS, but maybe it's in
part because of the experience.

I also didn't realize how big of a crowd was interested in even the simplest
tumblr blog customization, judging by how long this post sat in the #1 spot on
HN.

Perhaps we'll customize our mobile tumblr as well, and do a nice little write-
up on how to customize both to match your "real" site :)

------
spinchange
I clicked on the author's face and name and it took me to a Medium page.
Luckily, I can see he's the founder of a twitter profile called "Scoutzie"
which clears-up what his business is. /sarcasm

~~~
kirillzubovsky
I don't get your sarcasm. Where would you suppose clicking on my face should
have led you? It's the Medium blogging engine and it is in their interest to
have you follow from one of my posts to others, then to my collections, then
to collections of others. Pretty obvious flow of things.

~~~
jandy
This implies that the reader should understand the behaviour of whatever
particular blogging engine/platform the author is using.

How is understanding that clicking on a face in medium does one thing any
different than understanding that clicking on the header in a tumblr does
something else?

~~~
kirillzubovsky
But it doesn't. When you click on my head on Medium, I don't expect you to
land on my home page , or my company page, or any other page that is mine on
the internet. As far as Medium and readers are concerned, my Medium profile is
your destination (<https://medium.com/@kirillzubovsky>). On there you see all
my posts and all the social information that I provided, and you can further
explore the service and/or my links if you choose to.

The equivalent of a Tumblr logo on Medium would be their "M" logo. When you
click that, you end up on their front page, and not on my profile, which is
what you should expect.

You are partially correct, this implies that the user understands the basic
behavior of the web and expects my photo to lead to one place and "M" to
another.

~~~
jandy
Lets not conflate this with the M logo, which wasn't my point (I don't think
either of us would expect the Tumblr logo to take you anywhere other than
Tumblr).

The point, correct me if I'm wrong, of your post was that a company's logo on
their Tumblr blog should go to their own website and not to the root of their
Tumblr blog. Yet, because your blog is on Medium it's ok that none of the
titles go to your homepage?

I want to find out more about you. I click on your picture, it takes me to a
profile on Medium, which links to your about.me profile and your twitter
profile (and mentions a twitter handle for Scoutize). I then have to click
through those to find actual links to your personal blog and Scoutize. Why are
you ok with this interaction but it's not cool for a company to do it with
Tumblr?

~~~
kirillzubovsky
Ah. I see what you mean. Well, I don't control the Medium flow, so I can't
actually fix it, but that's not the issue.

Like I said, going from my face to my Medium profile is exactly what should be
expected. Much like going to your profile on pretty much any website out
there.

If by clicking on the M button I got somewhere other than the Medium front
page, that would have been a valid argument for you, but I do get to Medium
front page, so it isn't.

------
untog
Honestly, I think you're mad if you use Tumblr for your company blog. I had it
for my personal site, and it was extremely unreliable. At one point I had a
popular post on Hacker News that had numerous "well, it won't load" posts
attached to it.

For a personal blog that's not really so bad, but for my company? No thanks.

~~~
hkmurakami
Yes, it's the classic, "not there when you need it the most" behavior.

------
guptaneil
I agree with the problem, but disagree with the solution. When I come across
an interesting blog post, I also want an obvious way to the blog's homepage to
see more posts. It would be equally frustrating if I want to see more posts,
and instead end up on some landing page.

While designing my startup's blog[1], I looked at a lot of other startups'
blogs and noticed that most of them had the same problem the author describes.
My solution was to just put a 2 line description of what we do with a link in
the blog header, so it is very easy to get to either location.

1: <http://blog.tabuleapp.com>

~~~
jameshsi
yes! the main header on the Priceonomics blog originally linked our home page,
but that left users stranded on blog post pages when they wanted to visit
other tumblr posts quickly.

imo a link to your homepage elsewhere is a better solution

------
bowietrousers
Kirill Zubovsky - maybe more people would listen to and act on your sage UX
advice if you didn't come across as such an entitled dick when you're giving
it.

~~~
chrismacho
Not even that sage.

------
Skoofoo
> It doesn’t just bother me, it infuriates me. ... 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!

Is this a joke?

------
rsobers
Logo link issue aside, I'd love to host my company blog on Tumblr but have
heard bad things about the SEO factor of Tumblr sites, even if you use your
own blog.company.com subdomain. I have no empirical evidence of this, but
anecdotally it appears to be true, so I'v been deterred.

~~~
eberfreitas
What kind of bad things? I would like to know more about it.

~~~
WadeF
There are a few things that make Tumblr less optimal for SEO out of the box.

1\. Headers don't come with h1 or h2 tags out of the box.

2\. Title tags default to the title of the blog rather than the title of the
blog post.

3\. blog.domain.com does divert some SEO juice from the main domain. [1]

I wrote a short post on some of these issues that you can read up on below.
[2]

[1]: [http://www.seomoz.org/q/blog-on-subdomain-vs-subdirectory-
be...](http://www.seomoz.org/q/blog-on-subdomain-vs-subdirectory-best-
practices)

[2]: [http://wadefoster.net/post/43633476838/three-quick-wins-
for-...](http://wadefoster.net/post/43633476838/three-quick-wins-for-boosting-
tumblr-search-traffic)

------
hkmurakami
Tumblr goes down so frequently for me that I don't really understand how
companies can justify using it. It'll go down when you need the page to be up
the most (ex: when your one hundredth blog article finally goes viral or makes
it to the HN toppage)

------
ghiculescu
Annoyingly, the block he mentions in step 4 ({block:IfLogoInTopBar}) isn't
actually present in the default tumblr theme. I ended up doing something
similar near {block:IfShowBlogTitle}

~~~
kirillzubovsky
Thanks. Updated the post to include this.

~~~
ghiculescu
Cool, thanks.

------
canibanoglu
I agree with your point and find it quite disturbing myself. What punched me
in my face in your article was that you asked people to comment on HN if they
agreed. I quite honestly don't understand the reasoning behind this. Granted,
I'm a new member on HN but asking for comments just for the sake of comments
seems like broken Facebook "like"s.

~~~
kirillzubovsky
Perhaps I phrased that incorrectly. Since Medium does not have a commenting
system, I asked folks to leave a comment here, if they had one. Indeed, I was
asking for everyone's comment, not just the ones that agreed with me. Thanks
for pointing it out. Will remember to watch it next time.

------
chrismacho
I'm not sure I agree with this. People expect to be returned to the index of
that website/subdomain when clicking the site logo. If you want to give blog
reader easy access to your main website, do that at the end of all posts or
with some sort of accented nav item.

~~~
Smudge
> People expect to be returned to the index of that website/subdomain when
> clicking the site logo.

I'm not sure most people really understand the difference between
"something.startup.com" and "startup.com", especially when the logo is the
same on both.

If I click the logo of the startup, I expect to be taken to the landing page
for said startup.

~~~
masnick
Agreed. There should be a link back to the home page for the blog that is not
the startup's logo. The logo should go to the startup's actual home page.

------
masnick
Thank you, this has driven me crazy for years.

Every blog page should have a way back to the startup's main site. This could
be as simple as a bar at the top of each blog page that links "back to
startup.com" appropriately if linking the logo doesn't work for some reason.

The same is true for support sites. If you use a 3rd party service for support
or have a separate support subdomain, please please please give me a way back
to your primary site.

------
digitalpbk
<http://www.cucumbertown.com/magazine>, I think we have it pretty clear about
what goes to where.

------
walkon
With this approach, visitors that are viewing a blog post's dedicated
(permalink) page may not find an obvious way to get back to the root of the
blog as the logo links to the associated company site. To me, this can be just
as annoying, since I don't want to get into manual-address-bar-truncation
mode. Explicit links for each (blog root and company) in the footer are nice,
but often not to be found.

------
Cryode
Your "leave a comment on HN" link is broken. Fix it. ;)

~~~
kirillzubovsky
Woops. Turns out it was linking to an editing page. :/ That was a little
embarrassing :)

------
bravura
Hosting your blog on blog.startup.com is also broken, because you derive no
SEO benefit from it.

It's more likely that you drive traffic from SEO than from Tumblr 'reblogs'.

Hence, you shouldn't even use tumblr for your main corporate blog.

~~~
mvkel
This is completely false. SEO benefit to subdomains absolutely applies to the
root domain. Google's algorithm has changed a bit since 2005.

~~~
rdl
Is this 100%? I need to do some crap for RSA next week and I'd strongly prefer
to throw it on another host with a subdomain vs. some redirect magic, but
would like maximal SEO value.

~~~
WadeF
Sub directories are still considered best for maximal SEO value. [1]

[1]: [http://www.seomoz.org/q/blog-on-subdomain-vs-subdirectory-
be...](http://www.seomoz.org/q/blog-on-subdomain-vs-subdirectory-best-
practices)

------
xackpot
Great.. I fixed my blog. Why didn't I think of this doing earlier!

Thanks a lot.

~~~
kirillzubovsky
Glad I could help.

------
Kluny
Thanks, could anyone provide the same info for Wordpress blogs?

~~~
rsobers
Edit header.php in your /wp-content/themes/[theme_name] directory and change
the <a href="..."> that wraps your logo image.

------
baby
I'm thinking about Mojang right now.

------
huhsamovar
No need to read this. Another whine post.

~~~
lnanek2
He actually does tell people how to fix it in their templates. And having a
clickable logo that goes to your main site is basic advice even in very down
to earth books like "Don't Make Me Think".

