Writing CSS and watching the changes
HTML, theme code and documentation
Uploading the theme
Hosting External Stylesheets in Dropbox
Many Tumblr themes are styled exclusively with a single massive <style> tag. I suppose this is fine for publication and cuts down on HTTP requests, but actually working like this—editing, pasting & previewing one document ad nauseam—is a nightmare. Here’s a tip that in retrospect seems totally obvious but never occurred to me until now.
In lieu of an actual server, you can use a public Dropbox folder to host external stylesheets. This way you only need to paste your site’s structure—the HTML—into Tumblr’s preview window, making it faster and easier to alter the appearance.
Put your site’s resource folder inside your public Dropbox folder and link to the stylesheet’s public URL (e.g., http://dl.dropbox.com/u/xxxxx/folder/file.css) in the theme’s header. The folder structure is preserved, so you can still reference images using relative paths in the CSS.
Alternatively, you can create a symbolic link to the “live” part of your working directory in your public folder using this terminal command:
ln -s ~/Working/Directory ~/Dropbox/Public/website.com
After saving the stylesheet, in the time it takes to reload the browser Dropbox should have already published the updated file. You’ll see the changes immediately, all without dealing with Tumblr. Et voilà.
