Tumblr’s users who wish to move their content over to a self-hosted Wordpress blog now have a new solution. Wordpress developer Pete Mall used the existing exporter PHP scripts written by Hao Chen and its “enhancement fork” created by Ben Ward to create a new “Tumblr 2 Wordpress” exporter: http://tumblr2wp.com/.
Read more on Aphelis.
Photo: Skandalon, December 24th, 2010 (CC)
On December 23th, Skandalon celebrated its second year of existence (the very first post was published on December 23th, 2008).
However, as you may have noticed, nothing was published here for the past three months. To make a long story short, the last queue crash messed with the timestamp of all the posts I had stored either in Draft or in Queue. Instead of taking the time to recreate each and everyone of them (I was told to do so by Tumblr’s support team), I decided to work on a project I had in mind for a while: moving everything from Tumblr to a self-hosted Wordpress blog.
Keeping in mind that Skandalon was originally setup to be a usable online archive, I see three good reasons to move away from Tumblr to a self-hosted Wordpress blog: more control over everything, better SEO, better search function. That being said, I see no point at all to launch myself into some Tumblr bashing. I’m still convinced Tumblr is a terrific blogging platform for some users, especially when it comes to its ease of use (it really offers an effortless blogging experience). However, this quality could also be a draw back for some other users.
I’ve read about experienced Wordpress users who decided to move to Tumblr precisely because they were tired of doing server maintenance, dealing with upgrades, struggling with plugins compatibility issues, etc. As it turns out, I’m moving away from Tumblr precisely for the opposite reason: I want more control and I’m more than willing to spend some time coding and fixing things so they fit my needs (and hopefully my taste).
This project is divided in two parts. Part I is all about setting up a self-hosted Wordpress blog, coding a theme and setting everything up to my liking. Thus my first challenge was to replicate as much as I could from what I’ve come to love here over at my new Wordpress installation. I successfully achieve this task during the course of the last Fall season. If you never visited Skandalon (because you’re used to check new posts via your dashboard) you obviously won’t notice anything about the design. For those of you who are familiar with this website, you should feel right at home over at the new blog. If you wish to give it a try, simply visit Aphelis.net
Aphelis is still an online archive and I’m still providing adequate references for each and every post. With Skandalon, the idea was simple: I reblogged content, but doing so I systematically added details about the origin of the content, date and context of production, authorship, URL links etc (that, I would say, is the main difference between a working archive and a place were one dumps things without caring to much about them).
With Aphelis, I’m trying to do a little bit more. Along with the reblogged content, I’ll try to write some notes as often as possible. Why I found the content interesting in the first place? How is it related to the main theme covered by the blog (art, communication, technology)? Is there other related resources online? Etc. As a result, I won’t be publishing as often as I used to do here (around two posts a day for the last year and a half). But hopefully, I will produced more substantial content.
As I wrote above, this is a two parts project. Part II consist of moving every single post ever published here over to Aphelis.net, the new self-hosted Wordpress platform. This is a technical challenge. There are different tools out there built for this specific task. But none of them fulfills my needs. One of the main problem lies in the differences between the two blogging platform. For example, Tumblr does not use titles (except for some specific post types, such as text post, like the one you’re reading now).
Ben Ward, the author of the Tumblr2Wordpress export tool (a fork of Hao Chen’s script), is aware of this issue and working to fix it. While I was able to fix some other issues by tweaking the code of his script, the title problem asks for some advanced modifications (I’m not a programer and I’m not familiar with PHP). Truncating can easily be achieve by implementing a small PHP script within Ben Ward’s script (like this one). However, in order to generate a proper title, one will most probably want to get rid of any HTML tags and special characters within the truncated part of the post. I extensively wrote about this problem on Stack Overflow. Since I don’t have much time at the moment, I’ll wait to see if anyone comes out with a workable solution. Otherwise, I may give it another try myself this summer. Until then, Skandalon will remain as it is. I’ll probably update it from time to time, if only to point out to new posts published on Aphelis.
If I’m leaving Skandalon, does that mean I’ll stop following my Tumblr friends? That I’ll stop reblogging them? Fortunatly (for me and for you), Tumblr is not a gated community and the dashboard is not the only way to follow blogs.
Since day one, I found that “following” many Tumblr blogs –using Tumblr’s “follow” tool– wasn’t doing any good to my dashboard. It would become overloaded with posts and information, making it virtually unusable. So I decided to restrain myself to follow only a dozen blogs or so. However, there are more than a dozen interesting Tumblr blogs out there. The solution was simple: I subscribed to as many RSS feed that I wanted to and follow those from within a feed reader (I’m currently using Reeder for Mac 1.0 Draft 8, by Silvio Rizzi). That way I can follow fifty Tumblr blogs without missing anything. I can even flagged the posts I like while keeping this information stored on my computer and synchronized online with my Google Reader account (to my knowledge, there’s no way to backup of all the posts one “liked” on Tumblr: if one loses its account, one loses the archive of the post he or she “liked” in the process as well).
That’s about it. Upcoming posts on Aphelis include, among other things, a more extensive piece on what I’ve been calling “adequate references”, an interview with American photographer Jason Eskenazi and hopefully some more detailed information about a workable solution to export posts from Tumblr to Wordpress.
Happy Holidays to everyone: enjoy the family, the food and the snow.
XKCD updated his famous Online Communities map (the first one was released in 2007). Tumblr appears North of the Photoblogs island, in the Sea of Opinions. About this map:
Communities rise and fall, and total membership numbers are no longer a good measure of a community’s current size and health. This updated map uses size to represent total social activity in a community ― that is, how much talking, playing, sharing, or other socializing happens there. This meant some comparing of apples and oranges, but I did my best and tried to be consistent.
Estimates are based on the best numbers I could find, but involved a great deal of guesswork, statistical inference, random sampling, nonrandom sampling, a 20,000-cell spreadsheet, emailing, cajoling, tea-leaf reading, goat sacrifices, and gut instinct (i.e. making things up).
Sources of data include Google and Bing, Wikipedia, Alexa, Big-Boards.com, StumbleUpon, Wordpress, Askimet, every website statistics page I could find, press releases, news articles, and individual site employees. Tanks in particular to folks at Last.fm, LiveJournal, Reddit, and The New York Times, as well as sysadmins at a number of sites who shared statistics on condition of anonymity.
In addition to the much refined interface, you can now drag to reorder your queued posts.
Sorry for the delay. It took longer than we were expecting to port your existing queues. If you notice anything acting funny, please let us know.
I’ve tried to try it by queueing one of my draft post : it disappeared. Maybe it’s the timestamp on the draft post. I’ll wait a couple of days before giving it another try. I’m not the only one with issue : read the comments below the post (below the notes)
I’f you follow the link, you won’t find this picture. According to my RSS feed reader, it was published last night. But it has been taken down since then. The picture comes with this comment:
I’m not able to fix our errors, but I can help with our error pages. — Peter Vidani, “Not able to help with real world problems.”
Peter Vidani is a designer for Tumblr. You’ll find a reblog of this “We’ll be back shortly” post over at his blog.
I’ve got an answer from Tumblr’s support team regarding the queue feature:
We experienced some issues recently around Queues and Drafts. Some Queues posted all of their posts and posted them with the timestamps of when they were queued rather than when they were actually posted. Many posts manually published from Queue/Drafts were also posted with the timestamps of when they were queued/drafted rather than when they were actually posted.
I was lucky. Until recently, I used to keep as much as 80 posts in queue. I simply like to pile them up when I have the time, so they keep being published when I’m overwhelmed by work. Two months ago, more than a dozen of the posts I had queued were published simultaneously. From an existential point of view, I’ll agree it’s not much of a big deal. Nevertheless, it was not what I had planned. So I stopped using the queue feature: I would only put one or two post at the time in Tumblr queue (it kind of defeats the purpose though).
Than, it happened again : last week, two days after I published a post about similar new issues, the only three posts left in my queue disappeared. At first, I thought they were deleted (I was not happy, but I didn’t panic since I use Tumblr’s amazing backup utility on a regular basis). It was not the case. Here’s Tumblr’s support again :
If a post is “missing” from Queue or Drafts, look through the Dashboard or search the Dashboard for it. You will likely find it has been posted at the timestamp of when it was queued/drafted rather than when it was actually posted.
Those three posts were not displayed in the dashboard, but they still can be find here, here and here. I found them using tags, since the search function has also been experiencing difficulties for a while (but that’s another story). If you’ve been struggling with vanishing posts, here’s Tumblr’s support team advice:
1. Leave the post as it is.
2. Copy the post content, delete the post, and then recreate the post. The recreated post could then be published now, queued, or placed in Drafts.
3. You can set a custom date and/or time for a post and that will change its ordering on your blog (but not on your Dashboard). To do this, edit a post by clicking the Edit link to the upper right of the post in the Dashboard, change “publish now” to “publish on”, edit the date and/or time, and click the “Create post” or “Save changes” button.
I was told they were working hard so it wouldn’t happen again. However, since they told me the same thing a couple of times in the last 9 months, I’ll only being using the queue with caution.
Tumblr may have some issues, but it also got some solutions. I’m thinking about Marco Arment’s backup utility. It’s an amazing tool, and could be a lifesaver if you’ve been publishing here for a while. There’s a drawback though : it’s Mac only.
By the way, Marco Arment left his position as a lead developer at Tumblr recently (he’ll remain a consultant). Meanwhile, the emais I got from Tumblr’s support team have changed (in their structure and layout). I guess Tumblr is evolving. It’s surely getting bigger (it passed one billion posts last month, according to Tumblr’s founder David Karp). Let’s see if it’ll get better.
Previously on Skandalon : Tumblr queue
Tumblr queue is broken again. It’s behaving erratically in many different ways. 1) It will not respect the chosen interval of publication (every 12 hours in my case). 2) It sometime refuses to publish a post. 3) Or on the contrary, as it happened a couple of times before, it will publish every post in queue at once. 4) Worst of all, yesterday it quite surprisingly deleted one of my queued post : it hasn’t been published, nor can it be found in my draft, simply gone. I wrote Tumblr support about it : they acknowledged the problems and let me know, as they did before, that their
“developers are aware of the queue issues and will fix them as soon as they can”.
Maybe Tumblr’s staff put this bug in a queue for it to be fixed later. Uh-oh… Meanwhile, I propose a more accurate rendition of the options in the Tumblr queue.
 | When creating a post, you can now attribute its content (eg. a pull quote or image) to a source outside of Tumblr. That source gets clearly attributed everywhere that post is reblogged on Tumblr. The bookmarklet will automatically set the source, confirming that the current page is in fact the content’s origin. |
Looks like a nice technical improvement. But the basic argument is all wrong. First, the content attribution problem ―which is not exclusive to Tumblr― is not fixed at all. Second, the bookmarklet may automatically set a source but in no way will it be able to confirm that the page reblogged is the content’s origin.
If you’re surfing ffffound and happen to stumble upon a nice picture, the bookmarklet will display this : “fffound.com photographed or created this image”. Which is wrong, as wrong as before.
The fact is that no simple software implementation is capable, for the moment, to replace human judgement. The problem remains : if one wants to know the “source” of any content, one will have to make the effort to think and to do some research. Unfortunately, this condition for attributing the right source to a content seems to contradict one of Tumblr’s main tagline: “Tumblr makes it effortless to share anything you find or create” (Why Tumblr).
| The other thing that irks me about the Tumblr backup app is that is is just that, a “backup” and not a way to export your blog in any way that another blogging platform would be able to import it. It still doesn’t solve the problem of what is practically a data lock in. Sure, I can go through every file and copy and paste into another blogging platform, but with anything more than a trivial number of posts, the time this would take become prohibitive, and given the ease of publishing on Tumblr, it is likely that most people will have more than a trivial number of posts. |
About Dean Harris:
Blogger, internet enthusiast and amateur web designer from Brisbane, Australia. (Dean Harris).
| Tumblelogs have two key features that help users create an enormous backlog of posts in a very short time – “notes” and “reblog”. Through the latter button, users can simple click and reblog content found on another user’s site. This is one of the things that has made Tumblr such a hit among the masses, it is also one of the reasons that it is not in Google’s good graces. Search engines like Google use two key factors when creating rankings for searched sites: content and backlinks. Since Tumblr makes it so easy to copy content found on other blogs, it takes a lot more effort of on the part of a Tumblelogger to achieve a high ranking in results … because reblogging can easily become a duplicate content nightmare. |
A follow up on my post about Tumblr’s SEO problems. See also Sochable: “Tumblr’s Biggest Strength is its Biggest Weakness to Google” by J.D. Rucker, August 22, 2010.
| Hello. You are receiving this message because you wrote into Tumblr about a posting problem with your Queue. Late last night and this morning, Tumblr experienced a problem where Queued posts were posted rapidly rather than at their assigned Queue posting interval. Tumblr has now fixed this problem and it should not occur again. Unfortunately, we do not have a way to remove or revert the posts that were published from your Queue sooner than they should have been. We realize that this has caused you inconvenience and we are extremely sorry for that. We can only offer our deepest apologies and promise to work so that this does not happen again. |
I manually put each of those posts back in queue. It’s the third time it happens this year : there were problems with the queue feature back in February and March 2010.
| And a separate problem is that when “reblogging”, the original source on Tumblr is hard to track down. I try to be scrupulous about linking to the original writer/creator of things, but Tumblr sites sometimes make that hard to do, or make it hard to even notice that what you’re reading/looking at originated on someone else’s Tumblr site. |
Reblogging is fast and effortless. If the author of a Tumblr blog (or any other blog for that matter) doesn’t take the time to track down the original source of the quote or picture he’s interested in, it will get lost in the reblogging process (for example, try to find the original artist of a picture published on ffffound!). There’s a reason why Skandalon release only two posts a day : providing adequate references can be a time consuming process. But without them, this archive won’t be a proper archive. And I’m not saying that everyone should do this. It’s a personal choice. But then again, for it to be a choice, one would have to take the time to think about it : do I want to know who’s behind this nice illustration? Do I want to spend time to look into it? Do I need the reference? What could I gain from it? And so on.
| Yeah, Tumblr is definitely a disaster for SEO. I have had massive problems with pages not being indexed on Google. The URL structure is worthless and post titles are virtually non-existent. If you want a blog that ranks well on Google you would do yourself a favor by not using Tumblr. |
To be fair, it worth reading Topherchris post on the subject of search engine optimization and Tumblr (he works for Tumblr).
I became aware of the problem with this post. It was reblogged as is by a Wordpress blog (Innovation is Dead). If you try a Google search for “Beastness Jaclin”, the Wordpress blog comes up first. My Tumblr post doesn’t even come up (it uses tags, it’s making use of descriptive URLs and, of course, in my settings, I’ve allowed search engines to index my blog).
I’m aware, as Topherchris puts it, that it may be “related to how one’s template is designed and content is constructed”. But it’s a pain nonetheless. I should be able to get good search result for all of my post without having to tinker with my CSS template. After all, simplicity is what made us choose Tumblr in the first place. I wrote to Tumblr support about this. All I got was this:
“We can’t control what Google and other search engines choose to index and show. For further assistance you could try contacting Google or another search engine directly.” (april 22sd, 2010)
Notice they didn’t point me to a source of information, didn’t mention tags or meta-data and didn’t say a word about the template I’m using. Hell, I would have been interested in buying a template that as a good SEO system.
So for the past two months, I’ve been playing with export/import tools : I’d like to move everything from this Tumblr account to a self-hosted Wordpress blog. Granted, Tumblr is easy to use and, for me, it’s a great archiving tool for my personal needs. But as I understand it, I can’t do anything serious on it unless I start doing heavy research on how to modify my template. Which I won’t have to do on a Wordpress blog (I’ve been using this SEO plugin for years and it works great).
I know this post won’t show up on Google, so I’ll publish it on another Wordpress blog I own.
