This is not related to Sherlock (specifically lol) This show and your Tumblr have finally convinced me to get a Tumblr, but I can't understand them and nothing I can find on Google helps. Can you share or make a list of basic tumblr rules? If you can you're awesome!! Thanks.

I get messages from anons and new Tumblr-users who are confused by the interface, the purpose, and the “rules” of Tumblr almost every single day. The idea of putting together a simple step-by-step guide for new users has been milling around in my head for a few weeks, and I finally decided to start putting it together.

It is still a work in progress, so I’ll be updating this in the near future. I’m also going to post this as a real post once I get more done.

So here we are! I’ll try to make this as easy as possible for you…

Table of Contents (so far):

Part 1: Signing up and signing in.

Part 2: An introduction to the dashboard.

Part 3: Reblogging

Part 4: Settings

To start, welcome to the fabulous universe of Tumblr! ‘Tis a (typically) happy place, where the characters are beautiful, the fans are a bit nutty, the hipsters are….hipsters, and the spectrum of fabulousness is never-ending.

There are no “rules” of Tumblr, per se…. (They’re more like guidelines than actual rules.) I’ve always considered the “rules” a bit too do it or die and not enough it’s to make sure that you and your followers have an awesome blogging experience, okay. So, no, there are technically no official rules of Tumblr, but they are essentially a survival guide for a social network that can and will be confusing and terrifying even at the best of times. So I wholeheartedly recommend taking most of them into consideration when you do your thang around here.

Let’s get started on the actual blogging stuff, now that all that rule stuff (*cringe*) is out of the way.

Part 1: Signing up and signing in.

After singing up using your email and such, you’ll get asked all these dumb little questions to help “get to know you,” but honestly it’s hard to now what sort of tags you actually want to keep up with yet because what in the hell is a tag? And why would I want to find my friends on tumblr by email.

It’s your choice whether you skip all that malarkey or not.

Ah, here we are…. The wonderful home screen. After signing up using the “Sign up” button in the upper right corner and activating your email and such, you come along to this page. It’s so simple I wanna cry.

Part 2: An introduction to the dashboard.

The Dashboard (n.): The collection of photos, text posts, videos, quotes, and music that those who you follow have posted or reblogged.

That’s the “home” button. It’ll either take you back to the dashboard from another page, or it’ll reload the dashboard to show more posts. When the little red dialog box with the “1” or “5” or whatever pops up next to the “home” button, there are that many more new posts that are not being displayed.

This is your inbox. When you first start a blog on tumblr, you must enable your ask and/or your submission boxes in order to receive them. (I cover this topic a bit more in depth in part 4.)

That question mark will take you to Tumblr’s Help Center. While I may actually be able to answer some of your “how in the hell does this thing work in general” questions, the Tumblr Help Center will probably only be able to answer a few of the real need-to-knows, like how to change your icon/avatar. (Which I cover in part 4.)

That little gear-thingy is the link to the settings. I cover the settings area in detail in part 4.

And this… This is the place that we never speak of. This is the…. log out button. Tumblr will pretty much never log you out unless you delete your cookies or log in on a different computer, so this button is the portal to normality when all you do is reblog photos of cats all day. I’ve been there, and it’s a scary place to be.

The icon that is circled is the icon of tumblr user klappersacks, who in turn reblogged that Stoney’s photo from designstroy. The little + sign next to designstroy’s username allows you to follow that blog straight from the dashboard. You can also click on the usernames to go to their pages.

The little “25” box is for the notes. If you click it, a list of those who have either reblogged or liked the post will display at the bottom of the post.

The second button there (the arrows) is the link to reblog the post. I go into detail about reblogging in part 3.

The heart shaped button is the “like” button. Clicking it will only save the liked posts to your likes page.

This text link allows you to create new text posts. I’ll cover more of this topic in a future portion that has not been made yet.

The rest of the following icons are just the same, except that they have different layout and capabilities. I’ll cover more of this topic in a future portion.

Part 3: Reblogging

When you click the reblog button, a new window will open on your dashboard, and it will vary in appearance, depending on whether it’s a text post or a video, or a song or a photo. However, most of the post types have a similar section where you can type things out.

All of the above are relatively self-explanatory, but if you have any problems, you should be fine after messing around with each of them a little bit.

When you click this little arrow by the big blue Reblog post button, you have more options than just reblogging.

You can choose to “queue posts,” which means that they will be added to a list of posts that will automatically post at designated intervals. I explain one way of setting up your queue in part 4.

“Publish on…” can be used to dictate the exact date and time something is posted.

“Save as draft” is just like saving a document, in which you can come back to it and finish it off later.

Choosing “private” will make the post visible to only you.

“Preview on blog” is just a way to see how the post will look to people who visit your blog.

Part 4: Settings

To change your icon from that weird looking tofu thingy to either you or a sexy celebrity making a goofy face (because let’s be honest… the majority people on here have one of those two as their icons), all you have to do is click that change avatar button and upload a 100x100 pixel icon. Vuala!

Replies are always good to have enabled, simply because it gives your followers a different way to respond to something you’ve posted.

Keeping your ask box open is definitely going to be recommended by me. I wouldn’t be where I am today if I hadn’t taken the time to talk and make relationships with my followers. While you don’t have to enable anonymous if you don’t want to, it’s an option that you have available.

Whether or not you allow your followers to make submissions is 100% up to you. For my blog, having submissions open helps me out because people are able to send me links, but that’s not the case for everyone. So go with whichever you’d prefer, because it’s really the individual’s personal preference.

Now here is one place where you can change up your queue’s frequency. I know some people don’t even use the queue, but if you want to get more followers, the more consistent your blog is, the more consistently the followers will flow in. If you’re an avid blogger who posts more than 50 posts a day on average without a queue, you may want to have your queue set to post every 30 minutes or so. That way, if you happen to go out of town or you don’t go on your blog for a few days, there won’t be a noticeable lack of posts or anything.