Tumblr has rolled out a new “Pro Tips” section on their Help page. It includes a very helpful guide on how to create a custom theme for your tumblelog as well as a step-by-step guide on how to add Google Analytics.

Check it out!

stylesheet for the CustomCSS theme

Demo/Download

another one by tophercrhis:

Note: The demo has a rotating background which you can style to do the same or have a non-repeating image through Tumblr’s “Add custom CSS” field.

Download here

So you want a nice little theme for your tumblelog and don’t want to depend on someone else’s premade design? The Tumblr-famous Bill Israel and Richard Dunlop-Walters have come up with the perfect solution for those a little comfortable with CSS but lacking the time to learn Tumblr’s theme engine.

Their tagline “We’ll bring the theme, you bring the style” pretty much sums up what they’re all about! Go over here and check it out.

So, maybe you want to customize your tumblr theme, but you don’t want to get too crazy yet. Maybe just a nice wallpapered background to spruce it up a bit? It’s really easy to do- here’s how:

• Visit a site like Squidfingers and pick up a free wallpaper pattern. Download the image and upload it to anywhere you can host files on the internet.
• Go into your dashboard, on the settings tab, choose Custom in the theme selection area.
• Find the piece of CSS near the top of the code that starts with body { and ends with a closed bracket.
• Depending on which theme you were using, the body section may or may not have a background line. For your new wallpaper to take effect you either need to add one, or change the one that is there to look like this:
  • background: url(http://yourfilehost.com/pattern_049.gif) repeat;
  • the URL needs to be replaced obviously, with the URL of your wallpaper pattern
• Update your theme preview to be sure you like it. You may need to tweak some of the text colors or add a background color so that the text is legible, depending on how busy your wallpaper choice is.

To see this in action, check out my tumblr. I was using the Litewire theme, and when I added the wallpaper, the description needed some padding, so I added ‘padding: 10px;’ to the ‘div#description div’ section.