Cute Animal Zoo - Redesign
Saturday, September 26 2009, 4:23pm | Portland, OR
I originally started the blog Cute Animal Zoo as a present to Megan. She needed a place to go and get her cute fix that wasn't completely overrun with bad videos or pictures. For about a year now, I've posted super-cute videos whenever a good one came my way. Laziness caught up with me, and it sat dormant for several months. I decided that if this was ever going to be a useful blog, it was going to need a visual refresh and I would have to be able to queue several videos (something Movable Type wouldn't let me do). After trying a couple of different platforms, I found the one that seemed like the best bet, the somewhat cartoonish Tumblr. It's a great blog platform that allows full HTML modification, allowed Google ads, and made it easy to queue posts. Still, there were a couple of interesting things I figured out.
Facebook Comments on Tumblr
For some strange reason, Tumblr decided not to include comments on blog posts by default. This ended up being to my liking, however, because I could use one of my favorite recent discoveries, the Facebook Comments Box. The setup is pretty straight forward normally, but it requires a cross-domain communication file to be uploaded somewhere on your server. Since you can't upload anything to the Tumblr server, it seemed an unsurmountable hurdle. Thankfully, a helpful blog I can't find again right now showed me that I could simply include the javascript from the file and post it in a post on my blog. Then, just tell the FB comments tag to look in that blog post for the script. Success!
The new version of the blog is up and running now, although I'm still tweaking the design whenever I get inspired (if only I had any design talent!).
-AF