A Familiar Path

Right now you might be scrolling through your favorite blogs, like you normally do on Monday, and you are just about to stumble across something you want to remember. How to make that adorable birthday cake, a wall painted with a paint color you love, or maybe a funny post you want to share with your friends. What I am about to tell you is going to change your world. It’s going to change how you read your favorite blogs on Monday morning, how you find those posts again on Friday afternoon, and it may even change how you share those favorite posts.

Go ahead and open up a new window in Firefox. You are using Firefox as your browser right? (No it’s not required, just encouraged).

Or you can right click this link and open up a new window.

Come on, do it with me. You’ll be so glad you did.

You are headed to tumblr to create an account and set up a “blog” to store all your favorite links. I call it a “blog” in quotes, because it doesn’t feel like a traditional blog to me. You can type words, add photos and links just like a regular blog, so feel free to use it that way if you want, but I use it to store links.

It will ask for your email address, a password, and then you’ll need to choose a name that will identify your tumblr page. It can be your name, melissaslinks, or whatever you want. My tumblr page is afamiliarpath.

Click sign up and start posting.

It will then take you to a page where you will create your first post. You can try uploading a photo, typing some words and posting it, or you can move on to customizing your tumblr page.

Tumblr will guide you through naming your page. If you’ve called it afamiliarpath when you signed in, now you’ll want to make that more readable with caps and spaces, A Familiar Path.

Click on Theme and you can choose from several themes which will determine the layout of your page. This can be changed later. Appearance will change colors. Save and close.

Now choose a profile photo. You can also set your tumblr page to do all kinds of fancy stuff like send your tumblr posts to twitter or facebook. You can set that up now or do it later after you think about it.

It will ask if you want to follow people. If you want my links to show up on your dashboard (this is not your tumblr page), you can follow me.

This is what your dashboard will look like. From here you can access your tumblr page (see that red arrow on the right?), see what the people you’ve followed have recently tumbled and see your own tumbled posts.

Next you’ll want to click on Goodies at the top. I didn’t circle that in red, but maybe you can find it at the top of your screen.

Here you’ll find the bookmarklet. Follow the instructions to grab that for your tool bar. It will make adding sites to your tumblr page SO easy.

Now, let’s add our first tumbled site.

Here we are reading along on Ruthanne’s site. You see something you want to remember, maybe a purple cow. You click on the bookmarklet button you added to your toolbar, it says share on tumblr.

When you click it a box will appear.

This box gathers information that you choose to show up on your tumblr link. One important thing: you need to be on the permalink! The permalink is the link to one specific post you are reading, not the whole blog link. A link to my blog would be http://afamiliarpath.com. A link to one specific post here would include the name of the post after my site name. To get the permalink, just click on the title of the post. Tumblr will automatically store the link that is in the web address.

Say you want to include a photo. A photo on my tumblr page always helps me remember why I linked to that site. Before you close the tumblr box that opened on your screen, click photo.

Then scroll through (#2) the photos that tumblr found that are associated with that site. Choose one that will trigger your memory or best suits the post.

Now click create post.

Now go to your tumblr site and look. You’ve created your first link!

Just like a blog, tumblr shows the most recent tumbled site first, but you can go to older pages and see what you linked to a few weeks ago.

Even though I have a blog, tumblr helps me keep up with things I want to remember, crafts I want to try and fun things I want to read again.

I know you will love it too!