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The thing many of us Tumblr users love about Tumblr is how it’s so customizable. With a little knowledge of how to navigate your Tumblr theme’s html, you can make your Tumblr blog look how you want it to look.

Below, I’ve gathered a wide range of 10 great widgets you can add to your Tumblr blog just by grabbing the widget’s code and pasting it into your Tumblr theme’s code. To get to your theme’s html, simply go to your Tumblr blog’s settings: Log into Tumblr, click your settings (the gear button on top of the screen) and click your blog’s title on the left. Next, click the customize button on the right and then the “edit HTML” button on the left. This is where the code is for your theme and where you’d paste the widget code.

Most of these widgets are normally placed in your theme’s sidebar, but you’re welcome to paste it wherever you want the widget to appear on your blog. If you want the widget to appear on your sidebar, just look for the sidebar section of your code and paste the widget code in there. Be sure to make a backup of your theme before doing this in case a mistake is made. You can make a backup by copying and pasting all of your theme’s code on to a text file and saving it to your hard drive.

For each widget listed below, just click the link next to their number and it’ll take you to the web page that will show you how to get the widget’s code.

On to the widgets, in no particular order:

1. Music Player Widget: For adding a song or a playlist to your blog.

2. Twitter Widget: This widget will display your tweets on your blog.

3. Hit Counter: This will let you know how many visitors your blog has received since adding the widget.

4. Clock Widget: A widget that will display a clock with the time of the city of your choice.

5. Flag Counter: When added to your Tumblr blog, this flag counter will add a new flags representing the countries of your visitors.

6. Followers Counter: This is a widget you can add to your Tumblr blog if you want to show how many followers you have.

7. Tumblr Cloud: Tumblr cloud is like a tag cloud for your Tumblr blog and will show the words you blog about the most.

8. Social Sharing Buttons: Adding this widget to your blog will add social sharing buttons which will allow your visitors to share your posts across a variety of social networks.

9. Polls: Polldaddy.com has widgets if you want to add polls to your blog.

10. Facebook Likes Widget: This widget will add a Facebook like widget to your blog. You’d need to have a Facebook page in order to use this widget.

If you have a smartphone, you can download the Tumblr app to access Tumblr from your smartphone. Below is a quick tutorial on how to use the Tumblr App. Please note that Tumblr does make fairly regular updates to their app, so this tutorial is how to operate the app as of the date this tutorial was written.

1. After you’ve downloaded the app on to your smartphone, click on it and you’ll get this log in screen.

2. Once you’ve logged in, the first screen you’ll see will be your dashboard.

3. To refresh your dashboard screen, you’d simply use your finger to drag the screen down and release. If there are any new posts, they will appear.

4. On the bottom of the posts on your Tumblr dashboard, you can like, reblog, or use the email/permalink button by clicking on the buttons. You can also click the notes button to see who has liked/reblogged the posts.

5. One other thing I’d like to talk about is the tool bar at the bottom of the screen. The first button on the tool bar is the dashboard button represented by the house symbol. The second button is the tags button that you’d click to do a Tumblr search. The third button is your account button which would show you your notifications, number of posts, followers, following, etc. When the lightning bolt is highlighted that means you have new notifications. The last button is what you’d select if you wanted to create a post.

6. Click on the second button and it’ll take you to the “searches” screen. When you select the search bar, it’ll show you all your tracked tags, but if you want to enter a new search, just enter a new search term and click the “search” button on the bottom of the screen.

7. Next, click on the third button. Like I mentioned above, when the account button’s lightning bolt is highlighted, it means you have new notifications like someone has reblogged or liked one of your posts or someone new has started to follow you.

The account screen has a lot of information about your account. At the top, are your notifications. You can click that and it’ll show a list of them and what was liked, reblogged and if someone followed you. Below that are your number of liked posts and the number of blogs you follow. At the bottom of the screen, you’ll see your blog and any secondary blogs you might have. When you click on the blog title, it’ll take you to another screen that will show you the number of followers you have, if you have any messages in your inbox, and if you have any posts in queue or draft.

At the very top of the account screen, you’ll see a gear button and this will take you to your settings where you can log out of the Tumblr app.

The final button on your Tumblr tool bar is your post making button. When you click on it, it’ll give you six options for making Tumblr posts. All are there except for audio posts. Hopefully, Tumblr will allow us to create audio posts from the app at some point. You can close out this by clicking the “x” at the bottom.

And that about sums it up. As I mentioned before, Tumblr may make some updates to the app and so far, I can say that each update has made the Tumblr app much easier and more user-friendly. I always like to access Tumblr whether I’m at my computer or away from it.

Tumblr gives us a lot of freedom when it comes to customizing our blogs and if you know some HTML, you can customize your blog to make it look exactly how you want it to look. Just go to your settings button on Tumblr, then click your blog title on the left. Next click the customize button on the right and finally, click the “edit HTML” button on the left. Once on the HTML page, you can do your edits right on the left side of the page. Tumblr users can either tweak a bit of code or go all out and create their own custom themes by scratch. This is one of the many things I love about Tumblr.

This post won’t be an HTML lesson or even a lesson on how to customize your sidebar or fonts, etc. mainly because every theme is different and if I were to give you detailed instructions on how to change it on my Tumblr theme, for example, the information might not apply to your theme. Hope that makes sense.

I’m no HTML or CSS expert, but I know enough to make tweaks and style changes to a Tumblr theme. Years ago, I taught myself some HTML/CSS by reading an older edition of this book, HTML5 & CSS3 Visual QuickStart Guide, and I still keep it in my reference files. If you’d like to do your own theme customization but don’t know a lick of HTML or CSS, I’d advise you to get an HTML book or do an internet search for some free online tutorials. It’s not necessary to become fluent in code, but if you want control over how you want your blog to look down to the tiny details, it would be helpful to learn some HTML and CSS.

*Important* Before making any changes to your Tumblr theme, please make a backup of your current theme by copying and pasting all of the code on to a text file. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard about people pasting a new theme’s code into the HTML box when it still had some old code in it. Then they wonder why their theme isn’t working.

The basics for creating a custom Tumblr theme are in this link provided by Tumblr. It gives you the basic structure of a theme along with the HTML, CSS (the styles that are applied to the HTML) and the codes that are specific to Tumblr (like {title} and {description} for example). Once you know some HTML, the information in that link will make more sense.

Another way to customize Tumblr theme is to hunt down your ideal theme. You may not be able to find your absolute perfect theme but you can go to a search engine and type what you’re looking for. On a recent hunt, I found some really nice and free Tumblr themes. Check some of those out; maybe you’ll find what you’re looking for.

Other than learning HTML or doing an internet search for a Tumblr theme, you can ask theme designers if they’d be able to make you a custom theme. Just do a search for Tumblr theme designers and see what you can find. I’ve never requested a custom designed theme myself, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there are some designers out there who’d design a theme for you. Who knows; give it a shot.

Let me preface this blog post by saying I love Pinterest; it is a ton of fun and highly addicting, but it could use some work in some important areas.

In no particular order:

1. Pinterest’s Search Results

Pinterest seems to take a while to update their search results. After creating a pin with a proper description, hashtags, etc., it won’t be found in search when you do a search for the tag immediately after creating it. Maybe pins need to be indexed similarly to the way blog posts need to be indexed before a search engine will make them visible to the public. I don’t know for sure, but I’ve seen plenty of people complaining about how their pins aren’t appearing on Pinterest right away or at all. Another possibility for this issue is Pinterest takes a while to trust new pinners before they allow their pins to be unleashed upon the Pinterest community. I know Tumblr has a bit of a wait period before posts made by new users appear on tag pages, but Tumblr’s wait period isn’t nearly as long as Pinterest’s.

2. Pin Scheduling

I would love it if Pinterest had some built in tool that would allow us to schedule our pins and repins. Tumblr has a queue which gives its users the ability to schedule their posts and reblogs and it’s free to use. Twitter and Facebook have free tools like Hootsuite and Tweetdeck, among others that are great for scheduling tweets and posts. Where’s Pinterest’s free scheduling tool? I’ve heard of Pingraphy, but it doesn’t appear to be free.

I don’t know about you, but seeing my Pinterest home page covered with pins from one pinner can get overwhelming. If these pinners had a way to schedule their pins, they would be much less annoying, or at least, one would hope.

3. Finding Group Boards

Once upon a time, Pinterest had a nice little spot where you could find their group boards with this link right here: http://pinterest.com/groupboards/, but if you click this link right now, you’ll see there’s nothing there anymore. At least that’s how it is at the time of the writing of this blog post. Group boards are a great way to collaborate with other pinners to build a board that focuses on a particular topic.

It used to be easy to find group boards by using the link I posted above, but now, I have no idea how to find them. Sure, I can type in the words group board in Pinterest’s search field, but that would only return group boards that have the words “group board” in their title and not all group boards are going to have those words in their title. If one of you knows how to find group boards, please let me know. Hopefully, Pinterest will make finding group boards easy again and that link I posted will go back to its original usefulness.

4. Too Little Social Interaction

I know you can post comments on pins and invite pinners to join group boards, but that’s about the extent of how much communication that’s done on Pinterest that I know of. It doesn’t appear that many people comment on pins either. Sure you can follow pinners and boards too, but that alone doesn’t make for a social networking community. It would be great if there were a way to send pinners private messages or even a way for pinners to have a conversation, but there isn’t; at least I have yet to see this on Pinterest.

5. The Help Desk

I’m not going to go on a rant here, but Pinterest’s help desk seems to be understaffed. If someone told me they only had four or five people handling the hundreds or thousands of emails they probably get per day, I would not be surprised. I remember when I first joined, I asked what I thought would be an easy question for them, but I didn’t get a response until a week or so later. It was just a question about pin board categories, but my guess is they’re swamped over there and it is understandable for a company that is as new as they are.

Honorable Mention

I didn’t add this to my official list because I hadn’t thought about this as an issue until I read this blog post recently. I remember when I first joined Pinterest how I had to follow pinners and boards, but on other social networks, forced following doesn’t exist. Pinners who already have a ton of followers are reaping the rewards of this system; even ones who haven’t been active for months (not naming names) are raking in the followers.

I’ll admit this issue doesn’t bother me as much as the other issues I mentioned, but that’s only because I haven’t thought about it nearly as long since I just recently discovered that blog post. I’ll try not to think about it too much for the sake of positivity (too late, I know, ha!).

So, there’s my list. Hopefully, Pinterest is just experiencing some growing pains and will make improvements along the way, so I’ll cut them some slack for now.