Tracking threads is hard. You lose them, you don’t know whose turn it is, your dash ate the latest reply. You try to tag your threads so they’re easy to find, but you still have to go in and check every tag. You have to basically handwrite a page that lists all your tags or partners or threads.

So I wrote this code that lets you do a little setup and have a real-time live thread tracker. That’s the very plain, no style, just does the job version linked there. Setup is time-consuming if you’re one of those people with dozens of threads, but after setup it should just work.

1. follow that link and copy all the code there. paste it into your favourite text editor.
2. find “your_blog_url_here” and replace it with, easy, your blog url. Keep the quotes around it!
3. this is the lengthy part. Open up one post in a thread you want to track. It doesn’t matter which post. It has to be on your tumblr. Could be the first post you made to the thread, could be the last post you made.
   Look at the url of the post. It’ll be something like iamthefirechild.tumblr.com/post/35825614680/blah-blah-blah
   The part you want is the series of numbers right after post/. I bolded it, above. Copy that.
4. find “post_id1” and replace it with that number. Keep the quotes around it!
5. repeat Step 3 for the next thread you want to track. find “post_id2” and repeat Step 4.
6. you can have a fairly lengthy list of numbers here if you keep repeating Steps 3&4. Always enclose the post id number in quotes, and always put a comma after the quotes close.
   If you don’t do those two things, it will break.
7. After you’ve added the last post id you want to track, don’t put a comma after it, and make sure the closing bracket ] is there.
8. open up the customize page for your theme. Add a new page, and choose “Custom Layout”. Copy and paste the text you just edited, all of it, into the space. Give it Page URL, Page Title, etc. as normal, and create, then save. Make sure to save again on the customize page.
9. That’s it, you’re done! It should just work. Yes, it will be a plain white page with no pretty colours and some text.
   Wrapping all that in your theme could be quite a bit more complicated.
   Here’s a demo for you. And here’s what it looks like on a theme. Theme-atically speaking, there’s a heck of a lot that can be done to make the basic text look different or even display some different information. But I’m not going to try to teach you all that here; somebody’s head would explode.

I’ve been gone for a little while because, well, I had some crazy, and I realised it wasn’t good friendship to spill it out here. Please accept this code and set of instructions as an apology and my way of saying ‘I love you; I miss you; please welcome me back.’