My friend Miki, a hardware geek, is switching from Tumblr to Wordpress today. We had a discussion about “how can I import my Tumblr posts into Wordpress” for dummies ? I didn’t blog about it when I did it, but figured it’s maybe not that obvious for the average Joe (which I am).
Wordpress so far doesn’t support the import of Tumblr posts. So your only option is to import them via the RSS stream as a file.
First, open your Tumblr feed in your browser. The trick part is that you want to see the raw feed, i.e. XML code. IE6 will display directly the XML source code: if you still have IE6 installed, use it. IE7+ and FireFox have an internal feed reader, and will display the feed in a “readable” format. In IE7, you can turn the option off. In FireFox, it cannot be switched off, however here is a trick to disable the internal feed reader.
Once you’re on the XML source code, save it as a xml file (or copy paste into a new notepad document and save as whatever.xml).
Then, in wordpress, try to get there: manage > import > rss
It should be here: your-domain.com/wp-admin/admin.php?import=rss
Choose your file, confirm and you’re done !
One last thing that can be very useful: the Batch Categories plugin, that allows you to modify all your freshly imported posts at once.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Thanks, I hope to upgrade my Tumblr site into a Wordpress driven one, hopefully I might get to make more use of it.
Other tips, tweaks or pitfalls are alway welcome.
Jason
Hi Jason,
I am about to describe all the plugins i am using as well as the different customizations i used to make my wordpress easy to use !
Thanks Laurent,
The tips above worked a treat, shame that only 20 or so posts were transfered.
Another weird thing was that all my youtube clips imported perfectly - until I edited their tags and then they went haywire. I just deleted them as they were mostly just little funnies I had found.
Thanks again you saved me a lot of time getting my WP site up and running.
Feel free to drop by, it is pretty content lite as I am still trying things out (finding my voice, so to speak) http://jasonoleary.org
Just a quick note: postie plugin does a great job for mobile posting (pictures, texts, …). With that plugin, the transition is complete from tumblr to wordpress ;))
Great, I’ll try it as I have setup a flickr account for photo’s and send text as email (funny result if you use that for a photo - you get the image in hex code or something) I’ll add postie tonight and give it a go.
Thanks for the information. It came in very handy.
btw, there’s a very useful wp plugin to deal with spam comments like a couple of those above, called Akismet
Is there a way to download an entire RSS feed? Everytime I’ve tried to download a feed, I only get the last few posts, and not the whole thing. Any tips so I can get all of my posts?
Thanks…
Great tips, thanks Lauren :) At the first I do hope there is a plugin that could port Tumblr’s posts into Wp’s. Actually, I want to import all of my posts (tumblr, wordpress, etc) to Drupal. But, it’s more than enough. Many thanks!
# Jason O’Leary
Hi Jason, I’ve read an API explanation (tumblr.com/api, but I still confuse). They said that we can read our RSS feed with something like
myusername.tumblr.com/api/read/?start=0&num=50 . Maximum value for num is 50 and the default is 20.
So, if I have 65 posts I think we can separately download them into
myusername.tumblr.com/api/read/?start=0&num=50 (we get post 16 to 65)
myusername.tumblr.com/api/read/?start=50&num=15 (we get post 0 to 15)
.
.
etc
I hope this proved beneficial to you. CMIIW
# lawvol
Hi, how many posts do you get?
Alternatively, if you’d like to have both tumblr and wordpress, you can incorporate your tumblr blog posts into your wordpress. Doing that allows for you to still use tumblr’s nice bookmarklet for posting things you find. It’s takes a little coding, but it works out.
I’ve provided a tutorial over at my site, if you’re interested.
Great! BTW, I just did it and didn’t need to use the workaround in firefox. Just pull up the xml file in tumblr (yourtumble.tumblr.com/rss.xml) then go to File > Save As but instead of saving as a HTML file, there is an option to save as a XML file. That worked like a snap without all the Firefox tweaking.
Hi Rob, you’re right ! But the firefox tweaking was because of my work environment (old old old … !) ;)
Thx!
Hi, need your help, still. I did what Rob described (using opera), but I think the problem is I cannot find the right place to import tumblr’s rss in wordpress! In admin>import I have only 5 options: 1. Blogger (Import posts, comments, and users from a Blogger blog)
2. Categories and Tags Converter (Convert existing categories to tags or tags to categories, selectively.)
3. LiveJournal Import posts from a LiveJournal XML export file.
Movable Type i TypePad
4. Import posts and comments from a Movable Type or TypePad blog
5. WordPress
I’ve tried 5th (impulsively) and 4th, which worked - imported my stuff from tumblr, but now I cannot find it anywhere.
Why is that? Where should I look for it? What happened?
Thanks for response.
Thanks for the info!
Instead of tweaking in ff I just clicked on the rss feed button, got to ff’s reader friendly page that you described and selected view–>page source from the browser menu at top. Then saved that as feed.xml.
I imported it to wordpress in the way you described and all is dandy :)
Hi, just wrote a tool to import Tumblr into WordPress. http://haochen.me/tumblr/
I have this informativ site bookmarked. Thanks from Kredit
I just tried following your steps and got to the part where we upload the RSS to WP, and I have the same problem as Kasia. There are 5 options, but none of them are for importing RSS. When I try to upload my XML file, on these I either get an error message or a message stating that it was imported but then there is nothing there. Any ideas?
Thanks for the information. It came in very handy.
Hello. I am a complete RSS beginner. I bought a domain and installed wordpress 2.7.1 on it. The domain is a news related domain and I realized that the best way to go about would be to get rss feeds from different sites. For instance, what I really have in mind is that for the sports section, I can get feeds from skysports, for the forex/business section, I can get feeds from bloomerang and so on. I, however, have no idea as to how that can be done. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I need to set it up at the earliest.
In case you are wondering, my site is located at http://www.meet-the-press.info. I have a standard revolutions 2 theme installed :).
Thanks..
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