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.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 2nd, 2007 at 10:27 pm and is filed under Customize Your Theme. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.