After many hours, a lot of screaming, much frustration, and some ice cream, I’ve finally found a decent solution for putting Tumblr posts on the blog sidebar. It’s not what I would have wanted, ultimately (I’d prefer you see more text, but I couldn’t get that to happen without large images and videos messing up the sidebar), and I’ll keep looking for better solutions. The main takeaway for me here is that Tumblr plugins for WordPress are extremely poorly written. Just dumping the javascript output from Tumblr is not good enough, people.

The other takeaway is quite possibly that my theme sucks. Any little thing that wants to be wider than the sidebar gets its way, despite my protestations. I did not design this whole theme myself — I just heavily modified an existing one. I might consider switching, but I really love the look of this theme and want to keep it.

I’m wavering between dusting off my web design skills and just whacking this theme into shape, finding something similar but better coded, or just calling Stephanie Leary and offering to pay her to do it right from the ground up.

Okay, not exactly new skillz. I’m just proud of myself because last night I figured out how to add a sidebar to WordPress that only shows up on static pages. I’ve been trying to get that to work for weeks. (And now I have to go back and implement it on the resume page.)

I also updated my design portfolio with the site I implemented the sidebar on: raven.fluidartist.com. Some readers have already seen today — jewelry and such. I should have updated that site with WordPress a long time ago, but I was having trouble letting go of the design. I was actually quite proud of it – my first time implementing lists as header navigation using CSS.  True this was over two years ago now, but I’m still proud.  I could have used a bare-bones theme and made it look almost exactly like the site I designed, but I had to admit that it would look better with a new design that looked a bit more 2.0.

It may not escape your notice that my portfolio is not dynamic. I don’t see a reason to shove yet another wordpress install on my server for that — it’s just a couple of pages. Plus, I am proud of that design, too! Plus., I like that there’s some evidence of my roots in “old school” web design.  Remember when most pages were plain-old HTML? I even had a Blogger blog at one point that I had publishing to my own domain and a custom template. I had mad skillz back in the day.

And I still do.