Backburner Theme

Backburner is a clean & modern Tumblr premium theme Only $19 With a fresh install of Backburner...

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 16:10:00 -0700

Backburner is a clean & modern Tumblr premium theme

With a fresh install of Backburner you’ll have access to three custom styles, 40+ appearance options to customize, support for virtually every Tumblr feature, and scheduled upcoming releases (free) to cover user feedback and incorporate new features.

Three Unique Styles

Version 1.3 of Backburner comes with three theme styles that can be selected through the Appearance menu in Customize.

Ash Style - Light version with dark desaturated blues contrasted with vivid blues
Charcoal Style - Dark version with rich reds and light yellows
Royal Style - Dark purple with rich reds and light blue. Based on the custom theme on http://jonathanmoore.com

Additionally Backburner was designed in a way that it will make it easy for you to customize your own style and apply with the Custom CSS field.

Highly Customizable

With 40+ appearance options that give you the ability to select the style, upload custom header images, change the site title color, personalize the sidebar, and integrate 3rd party features like the Facebook’s Like button, Retweet button, Disqus, Flickr, your Twitter feed, and others.

Continue reading to see the extended Tumblr support, details on the typography, customization options, and a list of features.

Extended Tumblr Support

With Backburner you’ll find support for every type of Tumblr post including Answers, Group Blogs, Pages, Liked Posts, and third-party Disqus support. Over time as Tumblr integrates new features you will see them added to Backburner in future releases—free to anyone who has already purchased Backburner.

Beautiful Typography

Notice all the custom fonts in this preview of Backburner? The theme uses Cufon to display custom fonts for the headers, post titles, text section titles, quotes, and many others. There are two ways to enable the custom fonts in your posts.

Simply bold the first line in the caption or post body, and Backburner will do the work behind the scenes to add in the custom font.
Use Tumblr’s HTML editor to define H2 tags in caption text and H3 tags in Text post content. Although this is more work there are some SEO advantages to having H2/H3 tags in your content.

Typekit Support

Want ultimate control over the typography in Backburner? New to Backburner 1.4 is full integration of Typekit in the appearance options. Here are the basic steps involved in setting up Typekit for your site:

Register for a Typekit account - https://typekit.com/plans Typekit offers several affordable yearly accounts, but you can always go with the free plan with access to their trial library.
Browse through the library and click + Add to Kit after you’ve selected the body and title font for your site.
While you have the Typekit Editor open go through the list of Weights & Styles (screenshot) selecting only the fonts that you need. This is typically regular, regular italic, bold and bold italic.
Once you have your two fonts selected hit the green Publish button at the bottom right (screenshot).
Go to back to Tumblr and open Customize > Appearance, find the Typekit ID field and paste in your Typekit ID. You can find the ID by opening the Typekit Editor and clicking Embed Code at the top right. You only want to copy and paste the 7-8 character ID at the bottom (screenshot).
Now paste in the font-family values for the body and title fonts into Customize > Appearance. You will find it by clicking Advanced below the Selectors on the left (screenshot).
Example: “proxima-nova-1”,”proxima-nova-2”,sans-serif

Tip: Even if you don’t use Typekit you can use the Typekit Body Font and Typekit Title Font options to paste in other standard font-family fonts.

New in Backburner 1.3

Localization: Now you can select your language in Customize > Advanced to choose between English, German, Japanese, French and Italian. This will change standard buttons, title names, and other text elements throughout the site to your chosen language.
Video embeds: Improved the way that YouTube, Vimeo and other embeds are resized and rendered on the site.
iPad Optimization: Tweaked Backburner so that it looks amazing on an iPad for all you early adopters.
Text posts: Made the titles clickable links
Pages: Removed the meta data below the pages
Sidebar: Fixed the bug that prevented users from change the color of the title in the sidebar
Custom Fonts: Rebuilt the custom fonts to include more punctuation marks - double quotes, single quotes, em dash and en dash.
Analytics and Tracking: Added Clicky to the analytics options in addition to Google Analytics. Clicky allows you to see in realtime who’s on your site as well as many other features.
Facebook Like Button: Added additional meta tags so that more information about the post, your site, and link are added to a Facebook feed when a visitor clicks like.
Facebook ID: Added a field in Appearances where you can add Facebook ID(s) to give you the ability to track who is liking your posts. For more than one admin or user separate them with commas: “username,3889229,admin”
Bug fixes
Minor changes

See the full list of theme versions and changes.

Customization Options

Once you are inside the Customize screen and select Appearance you will be able to control, modify and tweak Backburner customization options. Below is a list of highlighted options, but for full details view the customization page.

Set the theme style
Move the blog title to the sidebar
Move the header navigation to the sidebar
Show group blog contributors in the sidebar and author below each post
Show reblog details below each post
Add sidebar “social” links

Extended List of Features

Three theme styles
Custom header images
Change the blog title color
Facebook like button
Retweet button
Customize the Tumblr title and navigation placement
Group blog support
Pages support
Submit content and Ask support
All post types support
Disqus support
Google Analytics support
Flickr feed
Custom typography
Typekit support
Smart conversion of bolded content to post titles
“Better Embeds” for Vimeo and YouTube
Sidebar links
Twitter updates in the sidebar
Liked posts
Ability to create custom styles with Custom CSS field
Theme optimized for search engines (SEO)
Future releases planned

‘Lightrails’ Interactive Installation The...

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 16:58:03 -0700

‘Lightrails’ Interactive Installation

The interactive audio-visual installation ‘Lightrails’ was a project that Strukt created together with unheilbar architektur for sound:frame Festival taking place at the Project Space inside the Kunsthalle Wien.

Via Kitsune Noir

Nike Crayons - “Write The Future” Press Kit W+K Portland along...

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 16:53:00 -0700

Nike Crayons - “Write The Future” Press Kit

W+K Portland along with crayon sculptor and artist Diem Chau created ten unique kits for Nike’s “Write the Future” campaign. What a great way to celebrate an incredible campaign.

Reblogged from Jonathan Moore

Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros have a very special...

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 16:47:00 -0700

Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros have a very special quality to them, their music is both refreshingly new but also very nostalgic.

Reblogged from Zen of Blogging

Sci-Fi Shooting Locations Photography site Photojoto put...

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 16:45:45 -0700

Sci-Fi Shooting Locations

Photography site Photojoto put together a Sci-Fi Shooting Location Google Map with a list of several dozen locations used for filming Star Wars, Terminator, Gattaca, Children of Men, Avatar, Star Trek and others. This mashup was inspired by Allison Davies’s alien landscape collection Outerlands.

Reblogged from Photojojo and Jonathan Moore

"Innovative design always develops in tandem with innovative technology, and can never be an end in..."

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 16:43:01 -0700

“Innovative design always develops in tandem with innovative technology, and can never be an end in itself.”

- Dieter Rams

1960s+ German industrial designer that influenced the design of the iPhone 4

Via Jonathan Moore

Lexus Hybrid Drive German motion graphics studio Barbeque...

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 16:40:13 -0700

Lexus Hybrid Drive

German motion graphics studio Barbeque recently released a new motion spot for Lexus promoting their new Hybrid Drive technology. This piece is an excellent showcase for what you can do with the Trapcode Particular plugin for After Effects.

See the rest of the boards on Behance

Backburner Version 1.1.5

Tue, 25 May 2010 13:47:49 -0700

Backburner Version 1.1.5:

Minor update that fixes a bug related to YouTube playlists within a text post.

Backburner Version 1.1.4

Wed, 19 May 2010 14:50:07 -0700

Backburner Version 1.1.4:

European and Japanese Support… kind of

The latest version of Backburner submitted today includes several user requests (keep the feedback coming) and changes to the custom fonts that allow for better support with European and Asian languages.

If you are posting content with lots of umlauts ö, acutes é, circumflexes â, and other extended latin characters (like the incredible travel blog Here to Geneva, you should follow him) there is now an option under Customize > Appearance to “Use extended font characters”. This will load in an extended version of the font with full extended latin character support. The only downside is the extended versions of the fonts are twice the filesize.

Several sites with Japanese content noticed that their text was disappearing all together with the custom fonts. So to fix this problem and allow better support for Asian languages there is now an option in Customize > Appearance to uncheck “Use custom fonts”.

The additional changes are mentioned on the Theme Versions page.

Hacking Backburner

Wed, 19 May 2010 14:48:00 -0700

Frequently asked customization options using Custom CSS and the Description

Quite frequently people ask how to make minor adjustments to the appearance of their site and often the easiest way is to use the Custom CSS field in Customize > Advanced and the Description in Customize > Info. The advantage of making tweaks through these two fields is you will still automatically get updates to Backburner as they are submitted. Below are several snippets that are frequently requested to get you going in the right direction.

Center content in the browser

#overall {
  margin: 10px auto 40px auto;
}

Change the background

body{
  background: url(http://PATH_TO_YOUR_UPLOADED_IMAGE) !important;
}

Override the all uppercase blog title

.header h1 {
  text-transform: none;
}

Full skinning and styling of Backburner
Advanced User* - Take a look at the source of the CSS file and you will see the three theme styles ash (6.a), charcoal (6.b) and royal (6.c) listed at the bottom. Copy one of the styles into a text editor, define the nine new style colors, find and replace the colors in the style, remove the style specific class from each html element listed (ie. body.royal becomes body), and the paste the new style in the Custom CSS field. Below is an example of the colors used by the royal style:

/* Colors
#ffffff; /* white
#ff1e19; /* red
#251f25; /* dark purple 1
#957c9b; /* light purple 1
#827186; /* light purple 2
#2b232d; /* dark purple 2
#2b232d; /* dark purple 3
#ffffff; /* white 2
#b8c0c7; /* light blue
*/

Add additional sidebar boxes
Advanced User* - Since the Description field allows for HTML you could close out the html tags for the description sidebar box and then create additional boxes with your content. Feel free to play around with this method, but it is 100% unsupported.

Your Description</p>
</div>
<div class="hr_side"><hr></div>
<div class="box_side">
<p>Additional sidebar box

*Have fun and experiment with these advanced ways of customizing your site, but keep in mind it’s unsupported. If you do something truly amazing with your site let me know and I’ll feature it.

Sahara Wonderland Braving through the rugged terrain...

Wed, 19 May 2010 14:31:06 -0700

Sahara Wonderland

Braving through the rugged terrain photographer Dennis Stauffer, zoomion, captured over 150GB of time-lapse footage shot in the Sahara at Ahaggar National Park and put together this amazing piece on the Sahara. The night time skies he captures are breathtaking.

Read more about the project, gear used, and exact locations for Sahara Wonderland.

"I’m loving this theme even more now… great customer service! Worth more than $19!!"

Tue, 04 May 2010 12:00:00 -0700

“I’m loving this theme even more now… great customer service! Worth more than $19!!”

- Elias:Blog, using the Backburner theme

Backburner Update 1.1.2

Tue, 04 May 2010 02:15:46 -0700

Backburner Update 1.1.2:

Added Facebook Like Button & Fixes

This morning I submitted version 1.1.2 of Backburner for approval. If you have already purchased Backburner everything should automatically upgrade for you; although if you changed the theme with Custom HTML you will need to manually upgrade or reinstall the theme to get 1.1.2.

Version 1.1.2 primarily changes the share options from Facebook “share” to the new Facebook like button. Check out all of the changes on the Theme Versions page.

Again, thank you for all the feedback and feature requests! Keep them coming.

How To Add Facebook's Like Button to Your Tumblr Theme

Tue, 04 May 2010 02:06:44 -0700

With the release of Backburner 1.1.2 I changed the Facebook share functionality to the new Like button that lets visitors share any Tumblr post to their friends on Facebook with one click. The $19 premium theme, Backburner comes with support for Facebook Like and Twitter retweet (through TweetMeme) as well as additional updates down the road.

If you’re looking to add the like button into your own custom theme the process is pretty straight forward.

Customize Your Button

Go to Facebook’s Developers site and customize the appearance and functionality options for the Like button.

URL to Like - This is the URL of you post’s permalink. Tumblr recently added variable that returns the URL encode version of the permalink - {URLEncodedPermalink}
Layout Style - Backburner uses the button count style because of the limited space in the share this overlay, but if your theme has the room you can use the standard style that shows additional information.
Show Faces - This option shows several of the profile pictures of the other people who liked this post.
Width - If you’re using the button count style you can get away with a width in the 75-100px range.
Verb to display: Give you the option to label the Like button as “like” or “recommend”.
Font - Allows you to select the font you want to use for the Like button.
Color Scheme - Depending where the button will be placed you can choose a light or dark scheme that better suits your design.

For reference here’s Backburner’s Like button HTML code:

<iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=
{URLEncodedPermalink}&amp;layout=button_count&amp;
show_faces=false&amp;width=98&amp;action=like&amp;
colorscheme=light" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" 
allowTransparency="true" style="border:none; 
overflow:hidden; width:98px; height:px"></iframe>

Insert IFrame Into Your Theme

After you have your customized HTML code for the Like button you will just need to place the code within Tumblr’s Post loop. For example…

{block:Post}
...
<!-- Insert HTML code from Facebook -->
{/block:Posts}

When you are adding in the HTML code make sure you place it outside of the Text, Photo, Audio, etc post blocks so that you only have to add it once for it to show up on the index page as well as the permalink pages.

New Share This Functionality Backburner 1.1 was just submitted...

Tue, 27 Apr 2010 11:32:29 -0700

New Share This Functionality

Backburner 1.1 was just submitted this morning for approval that is full of improvements, new features, and changes. One new feature is the Share This tool below each post. If you roll over the button you can copy the short URL, retweet using TweetMeme or share on Facebook.

In the upcoming Backburner 1.1.1 release I will be adding in support for Bit.ly which allows you to use their URL shortener and even roll your own shortener domain name with Bit.ly Pro.

Backburner Version 1.1.0

Tue, 27 Apr 2010 09:01:00 -0700

New Features, Sharing Support, Flickr Integration, Improvements, and Bug Fixes

Earlier today I submitted version 1.1.0 for approval, and it should be rolled out shortly. This new version includes quite a few additional features, improvements and bug fixes. If you have already installed Backburner (and haven’t customized the HTML) it should update automatically for you. If you have customized the HTML it might be helpful to dig through the changes or simply reinstall Backburner to update.

List of Changes

Feature: Short URL, retweet with TweetMeme and share on Facebook.
Feature: Added Flickr module to the sidebar. Add yourFlickr user ID to the Appearance module to enable.
Header: Removed the RSS button from the top right and relocated to the bottom of the sidebar
Pages: Removed the date from below the page since dates are not supported by Tumblr for pages.
Text Posts: Added support for <pre> tags for codeview
Text Posts: Limited the width of YouTube embeds to 500px to prevent breaking the page.
Text Posts: Limited image width to 500px.
Text Posts: Improved styling for various HTML elements.
Answer Posts: Added additional padding below question
Sidebar: Added RSS, Follow this Tumblr and Archive to the bottom
Sidebar: Added option in Apperances for a portrait thumbnail.
Sidebar: Limited width of images to 200px.
Sidebar: Fixed buttons for multiple lines
Sidebar: Fixed sidebar title rollover background
Sidebar: Improved element styles to help prevent poor rendering

Upcoming Backburner Release This evening I’m working...

Thu, 22 Apr 2010 22:28:00 -0700

Upcoming Backburner Release

This evening I’m working changes for version 1.0.2. Thank you for all the feedback, suggestions and requests for Backburner. After each new update is approved you should see the changes instantly on your site. If you have made changes to the HTML you can refer to the Theme Versions page to see exactly what has changed so that you can update as well.

Make sure you Follow Backburner so know about changes and new features as they’re announced.

Install Backburner Premium Theme

Wed, 21 Apr 2010 12:57:00 -0700

Install Backburner Premium Theme:

Version 1.0.1

The first version of the premium Tumblr theme Backburner is now available to purchase for $19. Future releases are planned to incorporate feedback, new Tumblr features, and additional styles.

See what has changed in the latest version.

Three Unique Backburner Styles Backburner comes with options to...

Mon, 19 Apr 2010 12:22:36 -0700

Ash Style

Charcoal Style

Royal Style

Three Unique Backburner Styles

Backburner comes with options to select three unique styles in the Appearance menu. Click the links in the list below to preview the styles.

Ash Style - Light version with dark desaturated blues contrasted with vivid blues
Charcoal Style - Dark version with rich reds and light yellows
Royal Style - Dark purple with rich reds and light blue. Based on the custom theme on http://jonathanmoore.com

Backburner Theme Features

Mon, 19 Apr 2010 03:08:00 -0700

Backburner is the perfect theme to wrap around all your Tumblr content!

With a fresh install of Backburner you’ll have access to three custom styles, lots of customization options, support for virtually every Tumblr feature, and upcoming releases planned address user feedback and incorporate new features.

Three Unique Styles

Version 1.0 of Backburner comes with three theme styles that can be selected through the Appearance menu in Customize.

Ash Style - Light version with dark desaturated blues contrasted with vivid blues
Charcoal Style - Dark version with rich reds and light yellows
Royal Style - Dark purple with rich reds and light blue. Based on the custom theme on http://jonathanmoore.com

Additionally Backburner was designed in a way that it will make it easy for you to customize your own style and apply with the Custom CSS field.

Tumblr Support

Typography

Simply bold the first line in the caption or post body, and Backburner will do the work behind the scenes to add in the custom font.
Use Tumblr’s HTML editor to define H2 tags in caption text and H3 tags in Text post content. Although this is more work there are some SEO advantages to having H2/H3 tags in your content.

Customization Options

Set the theme style
Move the blog title to the sidebar
Move the header navigation to the sidebar
Show group blog contributors in the sidebar and author below each post
Show reblog details below each post
Add sidebar “social” links

Continue reading to see an extended list of theme features.

Extended List of Features

Three theme styles
Customize the Tumblr title and navigation placement
Group blog support
Pages support
Submit content and Ask support
All post types support
Disqus support
Google Analytics support
Custom typography
Smart conversion of bolded content to post titles
“Better Embeds” for Vimeo and YouTube
Sidebar links
Twitter updates in the sidebar
Liked posts
Ability to create custom styles with Custom CSS field
Theme optimized for search engines (SEO)
Future releases planned