The Tumblr Experience
As you may, or may not know I moved my blog from a self hosted wordpress to a tumblr blog. Some may disagree with that, but what the hell it’s done. And now I’m going to tell you how’s my experience with it so far. The Migration Process
Well this was a bit tricky. One of my requirements for this transition to work was most of all not losing any data. That meant: posts, images, tags and obviously comments.
My first let down was that there’s no direct way to simply export from wordpress and then import to tumblr (actually there’s no way of directly export a tumblr blog either).
Anyways, after using my google foo for a while I found that there’s a 3rd party app where you can export from blogger to tumblr. By then I made up my mind and tried this:
- Export from self hosted wordpress.
- Import into dummy blogger blog.
- Create the new tumblr blog.
- Use this little tool here.
I was pretty sure I was going to lose a lot of stuff while doing this, but it was worth trying. After only 20 min of doing this entire process I was amazed.
All the images, videos, tags were there. #winning like Mr. Sheen.
Migrating the Comments
Let me tell you, the best thing I ever did when I started blogging was choosing Disqus for all my comments. All I had to do was configure my personal domain in my blog settings.
And that is also quite easy, as you can see in the following image.
As for the comments, all I had to do was follow all the steps on the Disqus settings for migrating a blog from one domain to another and everything was working in minutes (note that my blog was at marcomonteiro.net/blog and now is a sub-domain of marcomonteiro.net).
Choosing a template
This was the easy part, since the tumblr community provides so many great themes. Obviously I had to make some changes to the theme I ended up choosing. Hell, I’m still changing stuff everyday. But that’s another thing I like about tumblr, you can change your theme completely (that’s one thing that wordpress.com does not allow you to do, and that’s why I didn’t went from a self hosted wordpress blog to a wordpress.com blog).
Additional features
I needed my blog to have a few features that tumblr didn’t provide. Stuff like:
- Being able to show code properly.
- Having social share icons for each post.
- Adding ads to the template.
- The first one was pretty easy, once I found that you can use embed gists.
The second one, was also pretty easy, since there’s a ton of javascript plugins for that on the web. Just pick your poison.
Adding ads to my template was pretty easy. At the moment I’m using the amazon ads. And let me tell you, being able to choose the ads for my website is probably the best thing about this amazon service.
Things you should consider while using tumblr
Well, tumblr is not the best tool ever made when it comes to SEO. But you should be ok if you do the following:
- Add your blog to the most used search engines using their webmaster tools.
- Always tag your posts.
- Edit your template so the post tags can be in your header as meta information.
- Always add slugs to your posts.
One or two things that I don’t like so much about tumblr
- The Android app doesn’t support my Nexus 7 for some reason.
- Tumblr needs a better way to manage the drafts and non public posts.
- The search script is really bad. You’re only able to search tags and not the entire post. That’s why I end up using Google custom search.
- Tumblr should have the possibility of adding categories and tags, not just tags.
- That’s it, that’s my tumblr experience for now.
Have fun.