How to add a list of categories or tags to your Tumblr sidebar

Tumblr is a fantastic platform for building a quick blog, but it lacks some of the organizational features of more full-featured blog engines. In particular, it lacks the ability to categorize posts. The best you can do is add tags to them, but then Tumblr doesn’t make it easy to view all the posts with a given tag. No sidebar list is generated.

If you’d like to add a list of the tags you’ve used to your sidebar, you can use the Tumblr Tag Clouds tool to do so.

By default, it generates a regular tag cloud, which is a squarish block of your tag words in varying sizes depending on how often you’ve used them. The default code looks like this:

<!--Tumblr Tag Cloud [2012-02-10]-->
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://rive.rs/javascripts/tumblr.min.js?css=default&minsize=120&maxsize=280"></script>

To make it look like a category list in my theme, I modified it in the following way:

<b>Categories<b>
<!--Tumblr Tag Cloud [2012-02-10]-->
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://rive.rs/javascripts/tumblr.min.js?css=custom&order=frequency&minsize=80&maxsize=80"></script>

All I’ve done here is add the word “Categories” above it, since I think most users think of post groupings as categories of posts, and that’s how I plan to use them. Then below, I set the following properties:

  • css=custom (this makes it use your blog’s formatting)
  • order=frequency (since I’m not using size to show how many posts are in a category, I want the most frequently used ones at the top)
  • minsize=80 and maxsize=80 (this keeps all of them the same size, and smaller than the Categories heading)

I was worried that the plugin would try to fit as many tags on a line as it can, but I think the custom css command is making it put each one on its own line – either that, or it’s because my sidebar is so narrow.

I took the modified code above, and pasted in at the bottom of the Description field in my blog’s customization page, and that’s all that was necessary to add a list of post “categories” to the sidebar of my Tumblr site.

Your mileage may vary. Good luck.