As I explained in my last post, Tumblr is a light-weight hosted blogging platform that can be more than enough for many web projects. One thing that users accustomed to more full-featured content management systems miss when they use Tumblr is the ability to create static pages–for example, for an About page or a FAQs page. Luckily, there’s an easy way around that.
The trick I’ve used is to create subdomains for each static page. My personal blog is at jerrybrito.org, but my about page is at about.jerrybrito.org. That “about” subdomain is not hosted by Tumblr; it’s hosted on my own server. I simply took the HTML for my Tumblr template and replaced the dynamic content (the code that calls for the blog posts) with the static text of my about page. Voila, a static page for Tumblr.
Admittedly, this is a bit of a hack. If you need more than one or two static pages for your project, you’re probably better off choosing another CMS. A more likely scenario that would call for Tumblr, though, is if you have a website composed mostly of static pages or pages generated by some application that does not include blogging capability and you want to add a simple blog for your site. In that case, you can do the reverse of what I just described an put your Tumblr blog on a subdomain.
For example, I run a site called OpenRegs.com, which is an easier-to-use alternative to the federal government’s official regulatory portal, Regulations.gov. All of the pages on the openregs.com domain are generated by a custom-built application hosted on my own server. When I needed a blog to add the latest news and announcements about the site, I created a new subdomain at blog.openregs.com. That’s where the Tumblr blog resides and all the pages of that subdomain are hosted by Tumblr. The subdomain’s look is the same as the main site because I took the main template and simply added Tumblr code to pull in the dynamic blog content.
- Tumblr: A great option for simple blogs
- How to create static pages in Tumblr
Jerry Brito is a policy wonk by day and a web guy by night. He's been making websites since the days of Mosaic. His best known creations include Unclutterer.com, Stimulus Watch, and OpenRegs.com.
