Declare your independence from Tumblr

After several months, I was finally able to take a weekend afternoon and do something for me. Move my blog from free-hosted Tumblr to self-hosted WordPress.

I had intentions of exporting my Tumblr blog months ago since Tumblr’s outage. Little things were  starting annoying me. There were some posts that I wished weren’t auto posted to Twitter and/or Facebook.

I did download the Tumblr backup tool (Mac only). The last straw was when I was trying to find a theme for a couple of weeks  that would let me see all the tags in one glance instead of post, by post. I wasn’t able to find it, so I decided to finally spend several hours and migrate the blog.

The first thing I did was to make sure I had the web hosting and domain name in place. Make sure that your web host supports WordPress.

I’ve then backup the current blog(s) into the Tumblr backup utility.

If you don’t have a Mac, you can use the Tumblr2WordPress tool, to export your posts from Tumblr to WordPress. I prefer the earlier tool as opposed to the later tool Tumblr2WP, because the later tool was only able to get 4 months of posts, while the Tumblr2WordPress tool was able to get all of the posts from my nearly 3 years of posts.

I’ve then saved the file in an easy to remember place, because I them had to WordPress tools and import the XML using the WordPress utility.
Then my posts were all there.

Of course, I had to go in and check the images, as well as give titles to the posts that didn’t have any titles (mostly pictures.) Plus I had to sort out categories and tags as well, but that is a more gradual process as opposed to another strategy discussed in a blog move.

After you have done that, backup you blog (aff link)! Its no good if you do all the moving then for everything to be lost.

Oh, and don’t forget to tell visitors where you have moved to on your old blog. A simple, “We have moved” post more or less does the trick, or you can have the feed from the new blog “pull” into your former Tumblr blog, so all is not lost.

You can set this up in “Settings”  as the feed setting moved from the “Customized”section. You can select to pull the link or to pull the content. I would recommend the first so that folks know how to access about your new blog.