It has been quite some time since I last shared my work with this community. After a hiatus of several years, I am pleased to announce my return to theme development.
For those who may remember my previous work under another blog have returned with a fresh perspective and a new identity: whereinmnl.
To mark this occasion, I am proud to present my first new theme in years: Nimbus.
Nimbus is a minimal, dark-mode theme designed to prioritize atmosphere and clarity. It reflects a softer, more modern approach to the structures I used to build, featuring a "pill" style navigation system and subtle interactive elements that bring a sense of calm to your blog.
Key Features:
Atmospheric Design: A soft, dark gray palette intended for ease of reading.
Dynamic Interactions: Images transition from grayscale to full color upon hover.
Streamlined Navigation: Customizable "collection" tabs for your most important tags.
Floating Elements: Includes a floating status widget and a credit badge in the top right.
A Scroll to Top button: I mean, how convenient is that?
Fully Responsive: optimized for all screen sizes.
Creating this theme was a way for me to reconnect with the creativity I missed during my time away. I hope you enjoy using it as much as I enjoyed building it.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
ā Live Streamingā Interactive Chatā Private Showsā HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch ⢠No registration required ⢠HD streaming
Thank you SO much Astraea @donut-at-me for the beautiful theme you suggested for my blog š„° You are not only incredibly talented, but so kind and caring. I was truly lucky to come across you š«¶
The theme I got is called Safe Space Beach š and it perfectly matches my community. All her themes are free to use and can be personalized or adjusted; as long as you credit her and do not remove the credit. You can also request a theme for you only!
hi my friends! itās been a while! i hope all of you are staying safe. i wanted this theme to be a throwback to the simpler rp themes i used to do --- i myself wanted a new theme and i was looking for something that would be easy to customize while still being clean, sophisticated, and unique. i hope iāve succeeded, and i hope you enjoy it! ā”
CREDITS:
mrsthemes: base code
google fonts: font hosting
@suiomiāāā: font icons
@glenthemes: mobile photoset fix
@jetaimedits: icon on preview
animalities: the imessage chat code
padyluppet: styled audio posts (modified by me)
FEATURES:
400px posts
one sidebar icon (70x70)
six extra sidebar links with six navigation icon themes for you to choose from (fruit, celestial, forest, ocean, coffee, & harry potter)
two main accent colors that carry on throughout the theme
a sidebar title & subtitle
optional greyscale (of varying intensity)
an imessage effect for chat posts
a v messy code tbh, but i triedā¢
every ounce of love i have to give
TERMS OF USE:
edit as much as youād like for personal use, but do not use as a base code and do not directly lift code from this theme and redistribute it as your own. do not touch the credit.
if you encounter any issues, message me off anon with the link to your blog and iāll try to help! other than that, enjoy!
Iāve seen a lot of posts pop up throughout the past few months (rightfully) upset about how much worse the like to reblog ratio has gotten. I decided to dive deeper into that to see how much it changed and when this change happened.
I am really only active in the theme making community, so this post will be specific to this community, so I expect this will have different results for others.
This will be a long post, separated in the following sections:
Comparing the likes and reblogs - new and old themes
What does this mean?
Why is this happening?
What do we do with this information?
Comparing the likes and reblogs
New Themes
First, letās look at a few screenshots from recent themes. I will be grabbing from a variety of themes in tags + resource blogs to hopefully accurately depict what these ratios look like. These are all themes from this year:
I rounded the note counts up/down to make it easier, but this is approximately how simple I was able to get them without doing too much rounding:
A lot of these were very close to 2:1, so that seems to be a common theme here, though there are obviously exceptions. I did come across one theme with a perfect 1:1 ratio (60 likes and 60 reblogs), but I lost the screenshot. I will add it again if I can find it.
This is all simplified of course, but I think a safe estimate is that themes have around 2-3 likes for 1 reblog.
Older Themes
Tumblr didnāt always have this feature of showing likes and reblogs separately, but sometimes it does still show for older posts. These themes from several years ago, around 2016 - 2018:
I was kind of surprised to find a lot of these also are somewhere around 2-3 likes to 1 reblog. Obviously with some outliers like the 1:1 and the more surprising 8:1.
These are pretty small sample sizes, so this should be taken with a grain of salt of course. I hopped around a bit more and found these results to be pretty consistent so far, but I will probably make a part 2 with more info!
So what does this mean?
Based on the themes Iāve seen, between 2:1 and 3:1 is the most common ratio on theme posts
From this, it seems that the like and reblog ratio hasnāt changed too much since 2016, but that doesnāt mean nothing changed.
Itās possible that the outliers with closer to 1:1 were more common in the past, but I havenāt found enough to confirm that.
The themes from 2020 seemed more consistent than the older themes, 8:1 being the worst out of all the themes I looked at which was from the older theme group.
I found that the note count is the biggest difference here, not the ratios. While most of the themes in both groups float around 300 - 700 notes, there were more themes in the 1,000+ group in older themes.
Why is this happening?
Thereās a few reasons why the note difference is so big.
Since the ratios arenāt that different, thereās a few reasons this might be happening based on my personal observations:
A lot of people left after 2018. While Iām seeing more new blogs now than I did then, thereās still less people overall.Ā
These themes have been around longer, so naturally they would be accumulating more notes over time.
A lot of people blog from mobile and/or have stricter aesthetics than blogs used to have, which means those groups would probably not be interested in theme posts.Ā
Even though the like to reblog ratio has been fairly consistent over the years, itās still about double the likes to reblogs.
I found that a lot of people who reblog are also people who like the post, myself included. Itās not that only half of the people are reblogging and double that amount are ignoring the post.Ā Thereās overlap, so there might always be at least a little more likes than reblogs (though this isnāt always the case).Ā
What do we do with this information?
Again, this is specific to the theme making community, so I canāt say the same for other communities. I encourage people in other communities to look into theirs because Iām sure this will vary a lot!
But in this case, itās hard to say that the like to reblog ratio has gotten worse.Ā
My takeaway so far is:
1) We should expect less notes for now because people who probably used to use themes left the site, or switched to mobile only blogging. This isnāt something we can change or expect people to change at this point.You can still reach out to that audience, though! I will cover that in a future post.
2) The like to reblog ratio has been pretty consistent, which is sort of good news! It means that people arenāt necessarily reblogging themes less, thereās just less users. Reaching more users is another issue entirely, and Iāll try to make a post about that in the future.Ā
This isnāt saying that itās wrong to want more people to reblog, not at all! It would be great to make the ratio even better than it was 2016 - now. But if we want to reach a wider audience, we do need to approach it from the right angle.
If what I found here is consistent, then the ratio isnāt what theme makers should be focusing on, and we shouldnāt compare our note counts to note counts in older themes. There were more people on the site then, and theyāve been around longer. Itās not a reflection of how good your work is! Your work is still worth it!
I will make a sequel to this post aimed at what seems to work and what doesnāt for reaching a wider audience!
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
ā Live Streamingā Interactive Chatā Private Showsā HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch ⢠No registration required ⢠HD streaming