Can you make a side-scrolling Tumblr theme?

April 8, 2011 10:12 PM

Is it possible to create a side-scrolling and sideways posting Tumblr theme?

It's pretty easy to make the page stretch out as far sideways as you want, but is there a way to tell the posts to go in order sideways instead of up and down? It seems like custom CSS should do the trick. Anyone have experience with this particular problem or know enough about CSS to have some pointers? Links, tutorials, and expert advice are especially appreciated—I'm doing my own searching and I'd like to learn from the experience, noy just copy someone else's work.

posted by willhopkins to computers & internet (4 answers total)

I'm not sure how Tumblr themes are constructed, but the basic machinery of any horizontal-scrolling blog is going to be along these lines:
http://woork.blogspot.com/2009/02/useful-tips-to-design-horizontal.html
posted by robcorr at 10:23 PM on April 8, 2011 [1 favorite]

You just need to set an appropriate height on the div containing your post divs, and make sure the latter have float: left;.

Also, you might want to have a look at TumblrThemr - it lets you work on your theme locally instead of copying and pasting it into Tumblr. Very handy if you're making lots of little tweaks to the template and CSS.
posted by jack_mo at 3:50 AM on April 9, 2011

It's definitely possible, because I've seen a few tumblrs that do that. For example, here's one (I've seen others, too, but this is the only one I could find right now). Sorry, I don't know the details of how it's done, but you might be able to reverse-engineer existing side-scrolling tumblrs like the one I linked to.
posted by The pets.com Mascot at 5:02 AM on April 9, 2011

Thanks all! Problem successfully solved.
posted by willhopkins at 7:22 AM on April 10, 2011