Official Tumblr Account?

I might be caught up in icon commission on dA and Valentines cards to make, but that doesn't mean I'm not dreaming bigger for our little community.

I've been considering creating a Tumblr blog for the Fans Portal, acting as our "Main Site". On this blog, you would find a side panel to your right with links to our Twitter page, deviantART group, web forums, and a possible Facebook page as well; thus you can find all of our channels in one place!

On top of this, we could use the blog structure of Tumblr to showcase the latest happenings (Site updates, new developments in the official Shantae game development scene, etc.) and hottest topics in the community, but that's just the obligatory part! It can also showcase the latest and freshest fan art in the community too. (For instance, new fan art worthy of attention would hit the front page for everyone to see, with a link to the original so people can fave on deviantART and download the high-res version there.) This would give many Shantae fan artists a lot of necessary exposure so other fans can follow their works.

And once our fan gaming scene is kickstarted with some much needed life, (It's a terrible injustice for me to be sitting on the tech to make a fan game happen and not even use it. Seeing as my art hobby is no longer a disorganized mess thanks to livestreams, I'd like to explore fan engines again, personally.) we can also showcase new screenshots and progress videos as well.

Pretty much, it would be the one stop site for any digestible news fans of the series would be interested in; a conduit for all of our traffic. Also, considering the variety of content that can be shared on a Tumblr blog, we could keep churning out new posts at least once everyday, which would be much necessary to keep our followers interested in visiting our site on a regular basis. The whole staff would have access to the blog as well, so it will be fully possible for our staffers to draft their own full-length articles to post as well. The Twitter account can also be used to regurgitate links to new posts on the Tumblr so fans can stay notified of new articles.


What do you guys and regulars think of the idea? I can reuse assets from the Twitter page to create a background and skin for the blog, especially for consistency with the forum theme, but we will need a completely new banner drafted, as per Paragon-Yoshi's suggestion. This means Shantae and friends (Or foes.) will have to be drawn around our logo originally created by our most active moderator, ShantaeVocaloid. Considering how long it can take to vector even one character, this is a somewhat big undertaking in itself.

I'd be willing to draw the whole thing if no one else offers to help, but either way, we would be interested in your input and ideas to make the whole concept worthwhile. What should each of the characters being doing? How should each one interact with each other? Who should get a spot on the banner, and who would deserve it the least? The width of the banner will be ridiculously wide, and most likely in PNG format, so there aren't many limitations holding us back besides the actual file size. (Which can be remedied somewhat in optiPNG post exporting the project.)

That's it for this update! Thanks for reading and we look forward to any feedback you may have for this possible development.

A Tumblr for the Shantae Fan Portal? It couldn't hurt I guess if it'd help showcase fan content in a more readily available way like you said.

As for characters on the logo, I've always thought of Shantae, Risky, and Rotty as the primary trinity. At the very least, they should have a spot up there somewhere. Or at the bare minimum, Shantae and Risky perhaps on opposite ends of the logo. And perhaps even a stray Tinkerbat for good measure

We'd like to put in as many characters as possible, so yes, definitely Shantae, Risky, and Rotty. ^^ A Tinkerbat would definitely be interesting to add, and more than easy enough to draw, so thanks for the suggestion. =P

Hm... I track the Shantae tag on Tumblr (happens to be the only tag I track!). It doesn't get a lot of activity, but it gets little bits here and there (some of which is NSFW, but that's kind of to be expected on that site...). Having an official blog would probably end up posting the lion share of content related to Shantae, which certainly isn't a bad thing.

I wouldn't advise strictly holding yourself to "a new post every day", but you can always write posts and schedule them for a specific time (same can be done with reblogged posts), so it certainly allows for that setup.

DeviantArt works typically have a button to share the image to Tumblr too. As long as the post credits the author and links back to the source, nearly everyone is fine with this. So sharing things that way might be a good idea.

So yeah, I think I'd be in favor of this. I'm typically prejudiced against Tumblr, but I've had a decent enough experience by just using it casually, and it sounds like the way you're thinking about it would be really nicely structured and fun to take a look at.

I'm glad to hear that. ^^ We will certainly link to the original deviations in the source link tab, (Most likely with the fav.me links, as updates to deviations, and title changes, can break direct links.) so it will be very easy for the original artist to get their deviations noticed in their galleries.

And yes, I may have to wrap my head around the queue feature, so we can have a bunch of posts lined up and ready to go for a week before needing to manually post more again, and it'd be less to keep up with.

Since I may be creating the blog as a secondary, it will allow other contributors with tumblr accounts to submit posts as well, so I won't be the only one posting content. Hopefully we can have at least one new post a day, because it's probably important to keeping followers, and I don't think it would be too unrealistic to maintain, so long as there is some form of content to serve up.

Be sure to showcase my minecraft skins.

We definitely would when it opens, Axol. ^^ The Fans Portal's tumblr will be all about showcasing fan-made works, and that's one of them.

Just waiting for someone to post on my thread so I can post a new skin.

The blog is officially live now. ^^ In light of the fact that we don't have the resources for a banner, at least for the moment, I just said screw it and made the blog with the current assets we have now. Working on the HTML so the scrolling background on these forums is there too. If anybody here has a tumblr, you can follow it!

http://shantaefansportal.tumblr.com/

Nice work! I'll be sure to follow ya  

Thanks, Nai. ^^ You're not alone either, there are already five followers for the blog! I'm keeping a fan art queue of two weeks worth loaded up so there will always posts between the dry spells of Shantae or community related news, and other forms of fan-made content.

Also posting to say I finished the icons for description panel, so we have nice and shiny buttons to link people to our forums, Twitter, and deviantART group. Anytime you need to refer someone to our site, definitely go with our Tumblr. (Unless it's more important they see the forum first for the community.)

I'm playing around with the Urban v3 theme, so that image posts with text will actually display their text, if only one image is included in the post. Otherwise, our Tumblr theme is complete.

EDIT : Done with that now, every last detail is exactly the way I wanted. ^^

MOAR EDIT : Oops, forgot to include an IRC Channel button! That's done now.

T-T-T-T-T-T-T-T-T-Triple post! *bricked*

I shouldn't have to touch the theme on Tumblr for a while now, since after spending a couple hours on it, I even got the Twitter widget working too. That needed Twitter's own scripts, since jquery scripts no longer comply with Twitter's API standards as of v1.1. (And that has some developers in a mess too, until the functionality is restored in the newest version of the API.) So in the meantime, we have a working Twitter feed on the side of the site as well, and it doesn't destroy the layout.

Looks spiff! You certainly have quite the tech knack when it comes to plugins and formatting: didn't really realize just how flexible Tumblr can be

I can't visit the Facebook site.
Otherwise it is all looking good.

Facebook can be pretty annoying to non-registered viewers in that way. You can't even see half of somebody's profile unless you're registered, whether their privacy settings are full-on public or not.

Nai255 wrote:Looks spiff! You certainly have quite the tech knack when it comes to plugins and formatting: didn't really realize just how flexible Tumblr can be

Thanks Nai. ^^ Tumblr can be very flexible with the Edit HTML option. There's almost nothing you can't do with it! Some blogs really take advantage of it too, and if you can afford your own domain name, Tumblr will even let you use that for your blog, instead of a "_____.tumblr.com" address. (Blogs like PeekingBoo and Pusheen do this, so their addresses are much simpler, like http://pusheen.com/ .)

Also, I can't believe I messed with the HTML again, but I figured out how to clone classes inside the blog theme, so there are "Fan Art of the Week!" and "Announcements" boxes in place below the Twitter widget. Check it out if you like. ^^

Also, I'm considering giving Contributors, Moderators, and Administrators full rights to submit entries to the Fans Portal Blog, so I don't want to be the only one maintaining daily post counts. That doesn't mean everyone has to automatically pitch in, but the privilege would be there if you want to step up to the plate and contribute yourself.

Your own Tumblr blogs don't need to be as tricked out as either of mine. So long as you can post and have your own avatars set, you're good for submitting blog entries. (Although if people read your posts and want to check out your blog, it'd definitely be a good idea to have more than a blank template there.)

The only real writing guidelines I have are to use decent English grammar and spelling wherever possible, proper text formatting, (I enable the HTML Editor since that provides the most flexibility; the Rich Text Editor can be finicky. The former's not hard to use, just wrapping each of your paragraphs in <p> tags at worst.) and posting your name at the bottom as a signature of each post, - ala ~.Luke - (Tilde's or -'s work fine.) so everyone following knows who posted what. You can also preview your posts before submitting, and that helps pick out formatting problems.

The main site is also only for community related news, fan art, fan-made media, (I really should post some of Peach's musical work there before I go to bed.) official news from WayForward on their latest projects, and the like. There's no obvious character limit for posts that I know of, so don't worry about not having enough space to write an article.

With news especially, we have to deliver it as neutral and unbiased as possible, with no personal views, like real journalism should be done. Doesn't mean it can't have a human touch, but nothing personal should dilute the message; that's up to the reader to decide and determine for themselves.