echeladder themes

You're doing great! Really love what you've done with the place so far. Now here's something important moving forward. If you are making a neocities - especially if you are doing so with the motivation to fight back against Web 3.0 and reclaim the web as a space for individual users instead of for companies - please, keep the following in mind:

An inaccessible web is not a free web.

Repeat after me: An inaccessible web is not a free web.

Resources for Beginners to Learn About Web Accessibility and Web Design:

W3C's Introduction to Web Accessibility | W3C is the organization that decides on the standards of Accessibility on the web. They are an invaluable direct resource.

A Beginner's Guide to Understanding Web Accessibility

Mozilla's Accessibility Overview

WebAIM's Introduction to Web Accessibility

What is Web Accesibility in 60 Seconds! [YouTube Video]

Accessibility: What's the difference between WCAG Levels A and AA? [YouTube Video]

FreeCodeCamp | FCC provides an extremely beginner friendly Responsive Web Design course. The lessons for this course integrate accessibility standards naturally, and also have individual lessons specifically for teaching accessibility.

FreeCodeCamp's Accessibility Tag on their News Page

HTML Dog's Tutorial's for HTML, CSS, and Javascript

MarkSheet's Free HTML and CSS Tutorial

W3C's Easy Checks

W3C's QuickRef on How to Meet WCAG | I have filtered the QuickRef link to only show Level A requirements. This is the easiest level to meet and is considered the "bare minimum."

I just made a new sideblog and found out this setting is disabled by default.

This means that ALL new blogs will NOT have a [username].tumblr.com page. Not only that, but they will not have any themes besides the mobile-default.

As someone who really likes custom themes and Tumblr still having a fully customizable profile page, please turn this on!

You can make a website for your tumblr blog that is entirely your own!

Finding posts on your URL.tumblr.com page is much easier due to the ability to use your Archive and url.tumblr.com/tagged/[tag] pages!

Visiting your mutual's tumblr pages will become much more fun if they do the same! I used to always associate blogs with the themes they had, but that's sadly not possible anymore :(

If Tumblr themes die out, it will truly be an end of an era for the internet, and the future will hold only mobile-orientated, endless-scroll design devoid of personality.

Even if you don't like themes, this is a move that almost destroys Tumblr's origin as a blogging website and showcases the takeover of social-media-sameness.

Having your own URL and custom theme is fun! Try it today!!!

There are several posts and pages on how to create Tumblr themes. I figured I'd add some links and tools that I haven't really seen on this hellsite. Enjoy!

Chrome Devtools — This is an obvious one to point out to some, but I don't wanna leave it out. Right click and inspect on a website! "live edit" your CSS and HTML and watch it take action immediately. Just remember to copy the html/CSS into your theme before refreshing ;) I've used similar tools on Firefox since 2010, never looked back. devtools is powerful as fuck, but you don't need to know everything before diving into it.

Prettier.io — "An opinionated code formatter." Use the online playground to check your scripts or neatly fix and arrange your CSS. Or just HTML. It can also be installed in VS Code easily, which I highly recommend.

Coolors.co — colour patterns, gradients, create colour schemes from images, check for accessibility, and so much more.

Lucide Icons — the popular Feather icons just got an upgrade, so many Icons! Go here to see how to integrate it in your themes.

Neumorphism.io — What it says on the tin.

uiverse.io — Universe of UI elements to help you stand out. Great source of inspiration as well.

Fancy Border Radius Generator — Because why settle with squares?

Blob generator — if fancy Border radius isn't enough. Generator of much more than blobs, by the way! Check it out.

Open Props: Sub-atomic styles — Supercharged CSS variables.

Modern CSS Reset — better than Eric Meyer's.

Subtle patterns — been using this for over a decade.

CodeMyUI — repository for CSS snippets.

Codepad — a place for developers to share code snippets: PHP, Java, Bash, C, C++, Python and more.

Mesh Gradient Collection — because it's pretty.

WAVE — Check how your website/theme holds up accessibility-wise. Spoiler alert: get into aria-labels.

THE BATMAN theme one by lex ❓ the batman (2022) dir. matt reeves ❓ crafted especially for gifmakers  ❓ perfect for gif/photo-heavy blogs

get code 🦇 see preview 1 🦇 see preview 2

FEATURES 💥

showcase your latest gifsets/edits (optional)

sidebar: display your tracking tag/name at the top, show/hide blog title, customized description (especially if you want it to be different from your mobile description that includes links)

reblog button: emphasized to attract more attention, customized hover text (default is ‘do it’)

hide the like button (optional) to push the #reblognotlike agenda /hj

click to show tags (to hide the long #userblog #sourceblog and #edit tags)

post notes at the top of post for easy checking

updates tab (optional)

day/night mode

change cursor on hover (optional)

up to three custom links

responsive for mobile (make sure ‘use default mobile theme’ isn’t selected under advanced settings on customize page)

TO THE USER 💌

don’t delete the credits please

base code from @seyche​ ily (full credits in theme code)

customize page kinda buggy so i recommend having your blog opened in another tab and refresh after every edit to check

this is my second first theme so feel free to send me an ask if you’re having any problems with it

⊹・maybe “bug” isn’t accurate, but as of now, that is what it appears to be.

⊹・basically a lot of users are being logged out, both on mobile on desktop, and are being requested to change their password, yet are unable to. 

⊹・imo that logging out issue seems to be stemming from the issue with some custom codes; when you go on desktop to your customisation page and have had the issue from the previous point, you’ll receive an error message saying, “your custom theme has been reset because we detected some suspicious code.”

⊹・this is really weird as there’s no consistent pattern (e.g. let’s say there are two blogs with the same theme; this does not necessarily mean that both will face this issue), and even themes part of the theme garden (meaning that they have been checked and approved by staff) are receiving this error.

⊹・as of now, it seems that this is only affecting main blogs, not sideblogs.

⊹・it is possible that your theme can be recovered using the theme recovery; please note that this has not been effective for everyone.

There’s a lot of reasons so this is gonna be long! So infinite scroll is not good for both usability and accessibility. There are people that use keyboards to navigate pages, and with infinite scroll constantly adding new content to the page, that makes accessing info at the bottom of the page extremely difficult. You could solve this by just not having a footer, but that’s not the *only* issue with infinite scroll. 

There’s no way to go back and forth between pages, so you’ll lose your spot if you refresh the page. It can be overwhelming trying to find an older post since you can’t just hop between pages, you have to manually scroll through everything.

You also have to factor in people who disable JavaScript. You need to make sure you have some kind of fallback or they won’t be able to see older content at all.

WordPress’s official accessibility handbook recommends against using infinite scroll for similar reasons. And here’s a screen reader user’s perspective on infinite scroll.

Then there’s also the more personal side of it where infinite scroll has fed into a lot of people’s bad relationship with social media. With new content being loaded for you constantly, it’s very tempting. Social media platforms use this very intentionally.

Load more is a good middle ground and what I would recommend instead of just infinite scroll. I think it can work really well for portfolio/gallery themes! It’s also nice for mobile. However, load more still doesn’t solve the problem of not being able to navigate back and forth between pages or having to scroll through a lot of content just to get to older posts, so it’s not a perfect solution. 

I’m obviously very biased here and have strong feelings about infinite scroll. I’m not going to tell you that you can’t use it, but even the creator of infinite scroll regrets how it’s been used. 

urano: first responsive theme of my planetary journey.

preview and code (or click the source link to go to the code)

features:

500px post

menu with 4 custom links