Tumblr?? Help please!

[aluke]

After avoiding it forever, I've finally broken down and made use of the Tumblr account my friend forced me to make years ago. I still don't think too highly of the community, but it's so much simpler to post art than DA, so I want to give it a chance.

Of course, I'm completely lost though. I figured out how to post things just fine,  but how do I make my page look....not so default? Any Tumblr users want to share their knowledge and maybe show off your SFW accounts? 

[Taxel]

What you want is a new Theme! I use Theme Hunter to find a layout I like and then edit colors/images as desired. Its pretty easy, although with some themes it might be harder if you don't know anything about coding, but I'd be happy to help if that's the case.

[aluke]

Oh, thank you so much Taxel. I am going to look through it now, it looks like a great resource. Thanks so much for offering to help too. The last time I did any serious coding was in high school computer science, so saying I am rusty is an understatement. Lol. I'll have to fiddle around a bit and see what I can remember. 

[Taxel]

You're welcome! I kept floundering between not-so-great themes until I finally decided to just Google tumblr themes and found that one. I've had a lot of luck with it.

Thankfully since there are SO many themes out there you can usually find exactly what you want and never have to deal with coding beyond changing colors/images. Some themes even use color pickers/color code inputs and image uploads from the editing page so you don't even have to mess with the coding at all.

[Bekuno]

It's true that the community isn't always the greatest but there are easy ways to keep all the rude and negative posts/people off of your feed. I also highly recommend theme-hunter to find a good layout. You can check out two of my 5+ blogs down in my sig.
I also recommend you download the add-on new x-kit to chrome or firefox (whichever you use) to give you a lot more options on customizing your dash and just enhancing use of the site in general. Trust me, it's wonderful.

I've been using the site for four years and I'm more than happy to help you with anything you need to know!

[Strawberry Swirl]

You're always welcome to dig through my theme resource tag. Boop.
As for installing new themes, it's really just a matter of copy + paste-ing code into the "custom theme/edit html" section of the Edit Theme page. Feel free to hit me up if you need help, making pretty themes is a specialty of mine!

[sparkykandy]

Hopefully nobody minds if I post my own tumblr question, but does anybody know how the search button works?  I see a lot of repeat posts when I use the search function even when I have it set to "most recent."   

Does tumblr like to bring up the most popular posts or something?

Edit: Thank guys for the help.  Also, thanks aluke for letting me "hijack" your thread so to speak. 

Not particularly a big fan of tumblr, since it's hard to find stuff, but it is one of the rare places where I can find certain fandoms.

[Bekuno]

Hopefully nobody minds if I post my own tumblr question, but does anybody know how the search button works?  I see a lot of repeat posts when I use the search function even when I have it set to "most recent."   

Does tumblr like to bring up the most popular posts or something?

Tumblr shouldn't be showing you the popular posts instead of recent ones when you set it to "most recent". It doesn't save your last search settings aside from hiding nsfw content though. You'l need to check each time that "most recent" is checked off.
Another alternative is to change the URL from /search/ to /tagged/ (ex: /tagged/mlp instead of /search/mlp) and that shows you the most recent posts always.

The differences between the search and tag features (I think) is that the post has to be specifically tagged as something, but in search it can just be the word was included in the caption or title of a post as well as tagged.

[Strawberry Swirl]

Hopefully nobody minds if I post my own tumblr question, but does anybody know how the search button works?  I see a lot of repeat posts when I use the search function even when I have it set to "most recent."   

Does tumblr like to bring up the most popular posts or something?

Definitely try to use the advice Bekuno gave in changing the url to 'tagged/your search'; the search function is basically useless.

[SilverHorsey]

If you need a pony Tumblr to follow then check out mine: mannys-ponies

[kaoskat]

I've never used tumblr but it looks like you've gotten some good advice. I wish you luck!

[aluke]

Thank you so much everyone, you have all been super helpful. Now I just need to sit down and decide what I do want for my theme, there are so many options.   I think I know what I want for my BG at least, I'll just need to finish painting and constructing it. Everyone here has such pretty themes!

No worries about posting your own question here, sparkykandy, I'm glad you got some answers. If anyone else has questions feel free to reuse the thread too.

[starrypawz]

The other option instead of searching is to type /tagged/whateveryourlooking for. You are able to track tags as well so that can be a bit easier than using the search function

I've seen XKit recommended also you might want tumblr saviour which you can use to hide content so like if you don't like snakes you can type in 'snakes' and if anyone posts something tagged snake you don't have to see it. Also I think you still need to manually turn on the ask box, you can prevent anon messages if you want, and also the same for the reply feature you need to turn it on and you can set it to like 'everyone', 'people that follow me', 'mutuals only'

Also if you're posting something only the first five tags of it are tracked by tumblr so people can find your post using those tags if they're looking into a tag.

[Rad]

I'm seconding Tumblr Savior and I've heard good things about Xkit. With themes you can also message the creator of them if you need help. Sometimes they can assist with problems or maybe even tweak code for you. I run a Criminal Minds blog and wanted two things changed with the theme I loved and the creator was very gracious and gave me code to make the changes. (Obviously not everyone can go the extra mile, but it is worth asking for one or two changes.)

Tumblr can be weird and hard to maneuver at times. Google is a big help and there's usually tutorials or walk-throughs somewhere.