Tumblr Architecture - 15 Billion Page Views A Month And Harder To Scale Than Twitter

One of the common patterns across successful startups is the perilous chasm crossing from startup to wildly successful startup. Finding people, evolving infrastructures, servicing old infrastructures, while handling huge month over month increases in traffic, all with only four engineers, means you have to make difficult choices about what to work on. This was Tumblr’s situation. Now with twenty engineers there’s enough energy to work on issues and develop some very interesting solutions.

A great writeup on the growth challenges Tumblr has faced from infrastructure to hiring the right team of engineers. 

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Coco Theme Check out our latest Tumblr premium theme Coco!  It comes in three beautiful styles, but you can always customize it like the comic and art blog Magical Game Time with a few tweaks in the appearances menu. Digital shop, Style Hatch and designer Regina Casaleggio, are pleased to welcome the latest arrival to the scene, Coco, a sweet, charming, sophisticated, theme with lots of heart and soul. This beauty is “out of the box” ready to enjoy and be shown to the world. To keep this one-of-a-kind masterpiece from being altered from its original state of beauty the customization features are limited.  Buy Coco for $49 and take advantage of our stellar support - coco@stylehatch.co Really this post was a good excuse to try out Tumblr’s new KILLER highlighted post feature.  You guys are pretty brilliant!

Coco Theme

Check out our latest Tumblr premium theme Coco!  It comes in three beautiful styles, but you can always customize it like the comic and art blog Magical Game Time with a few tweaks in the appearances menu.

Digital shop, Style Hatch and designer Regina Casaleggio, are pleased to welcome the latest arrival to the scene, Coco, a sweet, charming, sophisticated, theme with lots of heart and soul. This beauty is “out of the box” ready to enjoy and be shown to the world. To keep this one-of-a-kind masterpiece from being altered from its original state of beauty the customization features are limited. 

Buy Coco for $49 and take advantage of our stellar support - coco@stylehatch.co

Really this post was a good excuse to try out Tumblr’s new KILLER highlighted post feature.  You guys are pretty brilliant!

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adidas NEO Label It interesting watching brands navigate their way onto Tumblr.  The ones that do well clearly understand the unique culture behind the Tumblr community.  Brands and everyone on Tumblr should take these guidelines for posting to heart in this order (Source - Seth Godin | The TED imperatives): Be interested. Be generous. Be interesting. Connect. As a bonus they did a fantastic job customizing our Style Hatch premium theme Juuvy.  Other brands that we have noticed who are doing great job on Tumblr and using one of our themes: Kate Spade (Swell) Nike ID (MARS) Puma (Juuvy) Alternative Apparel (Swell) Travel Channel (Atlantic Noir) Lucky Magazine (Swell) Men’s Health (Juuvy) Quiksilver (Swell/Atlantic Noir hybrid) X Games (Backburner) Time Magazine (Inspire Well) Ben and Jerry (Nova) Fab (MARS) Photojojo (Inspire Well)

adidas NEO Label

It interesting watching brands navigate their way onto Tumblr.  The ones that do well clearly understand the unique culture behind the Tumblr community.  Brands and everyone on Tumblr should take these guidelines for posting to heart in this order (Source - Seth Godin | The TED imperatives):

  1. Be interested.
  2. Be generous.
  3. Be interesting.
  4. Connect.

As a bonus they did a fantastic job customizing our Style Hatch premium theme Juuvy.  Other brands that we have noticed who are doing great job on Tumblr and using one of our themes:

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Look Back at 2011: Most Popular Themes

staff:

Tumblr gives you complete control over all aspects of your blog, and once you know some HTML, you can make them look pretty much any way you want! On the other hand, many of us would rather benefit from the skills of the thousands of brilliant designers whose work is featured in the Tumblr Theme Garden.

The top themes of 2011 were…

The Minimalist

Inspire Well

Wow!  That certainly made our week here at Style Hatch.  We have some pretty amazing new themes in the works that will be debuting over the next few weeks, including our new Artist Series with a curated collection of preset styles.  2012 is going to be a fantastic year.

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I think that social blogging platforms like Tumblr may see a huge growth in 2012. Your designs are helping lead the way in responsive and more customisable themes.

I no longer believe in web designers taking thousands of pounds to design a small biz web presence. Social is doing more to drive traffic, and I think it can stand up as strong as seo driving new customers.

An excerpt of a Style Hatch support email we got earlier today.  Small businesses need for expensive, custom designed online presence is declining as more of them turn to platforms like Tumblr, Virb, Squarespace and others.

Highly skilled and strategic web designers and studios will always deliver value to small businesses, but mediocre designers should be worried.

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Penman Theme Earlier this morning we just submitted Penman as our thirteenth premium Tumblr theme.  With an oversized layout and a focus on typographical details it’s a perfect fit for those of you who want to post high resolution images and videos as well as longer text posts.  Along with all our other Style Hatch themes, Penman is completely responsive with a layout that adapts from large resolution monitors down to tablets and smartphones. On a more technical side, this theme was our first to experiment with combining the HTML5 History API with infinite scrolling.  As you load additional pages through infinite scrolling you will notice that the URL updates (penmantheme.tumblr.com/page/2).  This allows you to hit back on your browser and pick up where you left off if you click a link off from the blog. To get an idea of how flexible Penman is, check out our alternate demo site Penman Dark featuring an all dark appearance. If you have any questions about Penman feel free to email us at penman@stylehatch.co

Penman Theme

Earlier this morning we just submitted Penman as our thirteenth premium Tumblr theme.  With an oversized layout and a focus on typographical details it’s a perfect fit for those of you who want to post high resolution images and videos as well as longer text posts.  Along with all our other Style Hatch themes, Penman is completely responsive with a layout that adapts from large resolution monitors down to tablets and smartphones.

On a more technical side, this theme was our first to experiment with combining the HTML5 History API with infinite scrolling.  As you load additional pages through infinite scrolling you will notice that the URL updates (penmantheme.tumblr.com/page/2).  This allows you to hit back on your browser and pick up where you left off if you click a link off from the blog.

To get an idea of how flexible Penman is, check out our alternate demo site Penman Dark featuring an all dark appearance.

If you have any questions about Penman feel free to email us at penman@stylehatch.co

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PUMA Sailing Around the World with Tumblr One of the most exciting things about creating Tumblr themes with Style Hatch is seeing how people and brands use the themes.  Earlier this week I had the chance to talk with PUMA about a few of their Tumblr blogs, and I recommend they look into Juuvy since I felt it would be a good fit.  Today I noticed that their PUMA Sailing team blog updated their look with Juuvy’s styling. This site is a perfect example of what brands should be doing on Tumblr.  They are posting a good balance of original videos and photography as they continue their 9-month, 39,000 nautical mile sailing journey along with other related reblogs.  Whether or not you’re into sailing (how many people actually are) the videos, images and audio that they are posting is fascinating.

PUMA Sailing Around the World with Tumblr

One of the most exciting things about creating Tumblr themes with Style Hatch is seeing how people and brands use the themes.  Earlier this week I had the chance to talk with PUMA about a few of their Tumblr blogs, and I recommend they look into Juuvy since I felt it would be a good fit.  Today I noticed that their PUMA Sailing team blog updated their look with Juuvy’s styling.

This site is a perfect example of what brands should be doing on Tumblr.  They are posting a good balance of original videos and photography as they continue their 9-month, 39,000 nautical mile sailing journey along with other related reblogs.  Whether or not you’re into sailing (how many people actually are) the videos, images and audio that they are posting is fascinating.

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Juuvy

Digital shop Style Hatch is proud to debut Juuvy, a fashionable chic modular grid with adjustable post sizes!

I was thrilled when Meg Lewis (Ghostly Ferns) agreed to collaborating with us on the design of Juuvy.  She did a fantastic job!  Make sure you check out her site and follow her on Tumblr and Twitter.

Like all of our other premium Tumblr themes, Juuvy comes jam packed with features that allow you to customize virtually everything including the colors, layout, typography, and adding social features.  Check out the Juuvy demo site and Juuvy York for a different dark flavor.  Pick up Juuvy on Tumblr for $49, and as always feel free to email us questions!

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Verge Theme Yesterday our 10th premium theme Verge went live live on Tumblr!  Verge is a unique side scrolling theme with individual post width control, similar to Inspire Well.  Just add “xs”, “xx” or “xl” tags to each post to set the widths to small (250px), medium (500px) or large (620px).  Also, if you want to switch things up with a dark theme you can switch Verge to a black mode in the Appearance settings.  More details on the features… I’m extremely happy how this collaboration with designer Nick Jones turned out.  As I was building the theme out I wanted to make sure the theme was full of small details that make Verge feel unique.  For the ribbon style page titles I used Paravel’s Lettering.js typography plugin to handle the correct padding on line breaks and positioning of the corner turns.  Using media queries to target mobile devices Verge looks beautiful on both an iPhone and iPad.  Also, throughout the theme you’ll notice a number of subtle animated elements that are powered by CSS3 animations and occasionally triggered by jQuery. If you have ideas, suggestions or questions let us know - verge@stylehatch.co

Verge Theme

Yesterday our 10th premium theme Verge went live live on Tumblr!  Verge is a unique side scrolling theme with individual post width control, similar to Inspire Well.  Just add “xs”, “xx” or “xl” tags to each post to set the widths to small (250px), medium (500px) or large (620px).  Also, if you want to switch things up with a dark theme you can switch Verge to a black mode in the Appearance settings.  More details on the features…

I’m extremely happy how this collaboration with designer Nick Jones turned out.  As I was building the theme out I wanted to make sure the theme was full of small details that make Verge feel unique.  For the ribbon style page titles I used Paravel’s Lettering.js typography plugin to handle the correct padding on line breaks and positioning of the corner turns.  Using media queries to target mobile devices Verge looks beautiful on both an iPhone and iPad.  Also, throughout the theme you’ll notice a number of subtle animated elements that are powered by CSS3 animations and occasionally triggered by jQuery.

If you have ideas, suggestions or questions let us know - verge@stylehatch.co

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Style Hatch Updates

Now that Style Hatch’s first employee Jess Brown has finally moved to southern California with his family, we’re charging full steam ahead on the future of Style Hatch and two other top-secret startups.  I’m loving the new energy in the office and looking forward to bringing on the next talented person—email me if you’re an advanced front-end developer interested in joining the team.

Charity Water

Charity Water
From the beginning of Style Hatch I have wanted to make giving a core part of the company’s culture.  In June we setup a Charity Water campaign with a goal of giving $15,000 to provide life changing clean water for 750 people.  Already with $7,200 we’re nearly half of the way there, and we should hit our goal in the next 37 days of the campaign.  Feel free to contribute. 

Theme Updates

Theme Updates
Over the last few weeks we’ve pushed through massive updates to all of our existing themes to add in our new photoset plugin (yay for high resolution photosets!), support for the new Google +1 button, new social icons, major performance increases and bug fixes.  In all Atlantic Noir, Ascender, Backburner, Inspire Well, MARS, Nova, Savory,  Swell, and Transcender have thousands of new lines of code and improvements thanks to all the great feedback we have received.

Customer Experience a.k.a Support

2,741 email requests resolved
In my opinion, quality support is far more important than the design and quality of the themes—although important.  When someone emails us it is many times our one shot at giving someone a personal experience with the Style Hatch brand.  Making customer experience and support a top priority has been our secret sauce in converting people into fans.  Plus, all emails that come in through support@stylehatch.co get an answer within a day or sooner.  As of today we have resolved 2,741 email requests!

New Themes

Right now we have four new themes in the works that we’re excited to launch.  Overall we’ll continue to focus on super high-quality, unique and highly customizable themes over launching as many themes as possible.  We’ll keep on pouring love into each of our themes!

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How to get out of a creative rut

Fantastic article by Nextness on how to power through “those stretches of days and even weeks when your insights dry up, your voice fails you, you lose your artistic eye, your drive to work disappears”.  I couldn’t agree more with their seventh way to dig yourself out of a rut.

7. Start a Tumblr.

Tumblelogs represent the early stirrings of late adolescent creativity, the melodrama formalized, put to music, friends found, band started, bingo. Thus there is always the sense of the achievable…the ever seductive notion that with enough hard work anything contained within it is attainable.

- Dossier Journal. This is why you should be on Tumblr; create one now. (Here’s ours.)

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The Burning House Part Things Organized Neatly and part “OMG my house is burning!”, the new Tumblr blog The Burning House interviews people asking them what would you grab on your way out if your house was burning. If your house was burning, what would you take with you? It’s a conflict between what’s practical, valuable and sentimental. What you would take reflects your interests, background and priorities. Think of it as an interview condensed into one question. Found on Holiday Matinee

The Burning House

Part Things Organized Neatly and part “OMG my house is burning!”, the new Tumblr blog The Burning House interviews people asking them what would you grab on your way out if your house was burning.

If your house was burning, what would you take with you? It’s a conflict between what’s practical, valuable and sentimental. What you would take reflects your interests, background and priorities. Think of it as an interview condensed into one question.

Found on Holiday Matinee

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The Web Designer’s Guide to Tumblr Early this year .net magazine asked me to write a feature article for their April publication as an introduction and guide to Tumblr for web designers who aren’t familiar with Tumblr.  The 3,700 word article covers my personal experience with Tumblr, the community, going mobile, and themes.  If you’re already using Tumblr chances are nothing will be new to you, but if you do read it send me a reply on Twitter and let me know what you think - @newezra

The Web Designer’s Guide to Tumblr

Early this year .net magazine asked me to write a feature article for their April publication as an introduction and guide to Tumblr for web designers who aren’t familiar with Tumblr.  The 3,700 word article covers my personal experience with Tumblr, the community, going mobile, and themes.  If you’re already using Tumblr chances are nothing will be new to you, but if you do read it send me a reply on Twitter and let me know what you think - @newezra

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