It has been like 3 months since Matt Mullenweg announced that Automattic acquired Tumblr. Until now, though, I have not seen any developments in my Tumblr Dashboard, nor any announcement for plans by Automattic on what to actually do with Tumblr. So what now? What current Tumblr functionalities will be dropped, and which WordPress features will be added?
Tag: Tumblr
Yahoo! Sold to Verizon
I thought I’ve seen this coming. Techcrunch reports:
After a months-long bidding process and many layoffs, Yahoo has finally found a buyer. Verizon (which owns AOL, which owns TechCrunch) is officially acquiring Yahoo’s core business for $4.83 billion in cash, which includes Yahoo’s advertising, content, search and mobile activities.
I just hope the new owner, Verizon, will be able to turn Yahoo! around. At the very least, I hope they can salvage what was left of it, especially those that were once great like Tumblr and Flickr, among others.
On Yahoo! Acquiring Tumblr
AllThingsD reports: Yahoo! Board to Meet Sunday to Consider $1.1 Billion, All-Cash Deal to Acquire Tumblr.
I’d say no to this deal! Remember what happened to Delicious and Flickr, among others, after they were acquired by Yahoo!? Can you imagine if the next time you login to Tumblr you are greeted with a Yahoo! account authentication? I can’t!
UPDATE: Yahoo Tumblrs for Cool: Board Approves $1.1 Billion Deal as Expected
It appears that the deal indeed went through. But I have to wait for the changes before any drastic action is taken to my Tumblr blog.

Tumblr2WP: A WooThemes Tumblr Exporter
I have mentioned earlier two alternatives in migrating your Tumblr blog to WordPress, both of which are not so ideal solution — I’ve concluded. WooThemes recently has come up with their new tool, a free utility to help you with the same migration, the Tumblr2WP.
Tumblr2WP makes it super simple to transfer your Tumblr content to your own, self-hosted WordPress install.
This tool will create a WXR (WordPress eXtended RSS) file from your tumblr site which can be imported into WordPress.
With the introduction of the Custom Post Formats in the new WordPress 3.1, it just makes it more compelling to switch blogging from Tumblr to WordPress instead. Continue reading

Tumblr: From Downtimes to Spam Blogs
I have liked Tumblr from the moment I started using the service. The main selling points being able to customize the look of your blog to using using a custom domain names. Both for free (WordPress.com charge you for both). You can put your own ads, whatever pleases you.
I have constantly defended Tumblr versus its closest rival Posterous in the Tumblelogging arena.
But a lot of criticisms about the service have been raised. Up until now, except for Premium themes, Tumblr has no major revenue model, unlike other free but thriving online services. It’s not backed by a major online company, say like Google. So a question can always be raised about its sustainability. That’s on top of the fact that Mashable recently run a story about Tumblr getting a fresh investment.
Yesterday, Tumblr experienced a long downtime. I’m not particular with the actual length of time it was down, but it was real long by online services standard. It must have been at least 12 hours. This further puts a question on the ability of the company to actually keep up with this type of problems.
Another thing, I noticed lately that there has been a lot of spam blogs and spam Tumblr users liking or reblogging my posts. Same question: How would Tumblr Staff keep up with this to avoid or even eliminate spam registrations and blogs. Good thing Tumblr has no built-in commenting system. I can’t imagine further how would they respond.
So if you are a Tumblr user, you aren’t even worried about the future of your Tumblr blog?

Migrating from Tumblr to WordPress
Don’t get me wrong, Tumblr is great. But with my so many experience with the different blogging engine and even other CMS’s, I always find myself going back to realizing that WordPress is way better.
It had been said many times that it is very important to choose the right blogging platform from the very start. But what do you do when you find yourself making the same mistake as others when they started out their blog?
Here are two ways you can import your posts from Tumblr to WordPress. For purposes of our test, I had more than 1,300 posts at my Tumblr blog that I tried migrating.
Tumblr2WordPress Utility
The process basically involves visiting the utility page over at benapps.net, key in your tumblr url, tweak some settings, and download the WXR (WordPress eXtended Rss) file (in .xml extension) —which by the way is the same format when you export a WordPress blog.
Then heading over to the WordPress blog you want to migrate your posts into, you would import the same just as you would a regular WordPress WXR file.
The results:
- 1,218 posts were successfully imported, that leaves me missing with more than 100 posts — more or less 90% successful import;
- As expected, comments were not imported. But that is something we can have a work around later with the Disqus plugin for WordPress (I was using Disqus as well in my Tumblr blog);
- Posts like photos, audio and videos (which don’t really have post titles by Tumblr standard) have blank titles — that leaves too many polishing yet to be done;
- Media are still hosted at Tumblr — media files weren’t imported;
- Tags are properly reflected in the new WordPress blog;
- WordPress can very well handle post redirection from the original Tumblr permalink structure;
The Posterous Route
If you have not yet known, Posterous has a feature that can import your whole Tumblr blog. On the other hand, WordPress.com has a feature to import from a Posterous blog. Using this route, and the same Tumblr numbers from above, we have noted:
- Only around 700 posts were successfully imported — a dismal 50% turnout;
- Comments were not as well imported;
- Posts like photos, audio and videos (which don’t really have post titles by Tumblr standard) have common post titles, i.e., “Untitled” — that leaves much more polishing to be done;
- Media files were actually imported into WordPress.com servers;
- Actual tags were not imported. Instead, posts were categorized accordingly as Photo, Audio, Video, etc.
- A new permalink structure, different than the original Tumblr structure that included post ID’s — this would surely lead to bad links;
Conclusion
So far, these two are the only viable solution to migrating from Tumblr to WordPress. Either way can be a pain, especially if you already have a huge blog at Tumblr. Either way, you pay a price for not starting out with the right blogging platform — charge to experience. But in the end of the day, you have to do it if you really need to.
We just hope someday there’ll be a better and smoother solution to help us Tumblr users out migrating to WordPress.
Bullet Points: Facebook, Friendster, Tumblr, Prime Lenses
Tumblr Search
Good news for Tumblr users. Now we don’t have to wait anymore for Google to index our pages in tumblr in order for Google Custom Search to actually display search results from our tumblr archives. Tumblr now has a built-in search.
Wait, now how am I gonna implement this in my tumblelog?
The Power of Prime Lenses
Oftentimes, beginners dismiss prime lenses as inconvenient. And they overlook the positive side of it:
- They are usually cheaper as compared to equivalent zooms, as they are less complicated to design and manufacture.
- They usually produce better pictures. No rotating elements as for zooms, so usually no setbacks for the convenience of zooms. I don’t really have no pictures as evidence to back that argument. Just better ask the experts. But, really, based on experience, one usually makes the most our of his/her DSLR while using prime lenses.
- It helps you become more creative with your composition, as you zoom by your feet.
Not convinced yet? Read more from here.
Tumblelogging at Obeertym.com (Update: at deuts.org)
What’s a tumblelog, in the first place:
A tumblelog (also known as a tlog or tumblog) is a variation of a blog that favors short-form, mixed-media posts over the longer editorial posts frequently associated with blogging. Common post formats found on tumblelogs include links, photos, quotes, dialogues, and video. Unlike blogs, tumblelogs are frequently used to share the author’s creations, discoveries, or experiences while providing little or no commentary.
Tumblelogs usually consist of a stream of ideas (and media) while one is online or even offline. While blogs usually are long post, tumblelogs are short–just anything you want to share.
In the words of Tumblr:
To make a simple analogy: If blogs are journals, tumblelogs are scrapbooks.
I particularly loved the system behind tumblr to build my tumblelog upon. I received an invitation to try out tumblr long before, but I actually tried out the service only since last week. Having some spare domain names, I decided to put them up to good use and give tumblr a try.