2008
Moving from Blogger to Tumblr
Note: if you want to use the importer, go here.
Update: This blog post is about the old importer which no longer works due to Tumblr’s API changes. Try the new one at www.bloggertotumblr.com.
I’ve been using Tumblr for about 6 months now, and I’ve loved it from the start. Up till now, I’ve only used it for my tumblelog and a few private groups for projects. But every time I posted on my regular blog, I missed Tumblr. That’s what gave me a crazy thought: move my blog to Tumblr.
Yes, we can finally start proving all those people wrong who say Tumblr is just for microblogging.
To get people moving to Tumblr though, it needs to be able to transfer posts from other blogging services. I know of one tool to move from WordPress. But I haven’t seen anything to move from Blogger.
After just a few evenings, I hacked up a tool to import Blogger posts to Tumblr. It’s written in PHP and the source is available in zip or tar.bz2 on github.
I’ve officially moved my entire blog now. :-) Unfortunately, I didn’t have a domain before, so anyone wanting to follow it will have to update their links. To prevent this from happening ever again, I got a domain — plpatterns.com — and began using FeedBurner for my feed.
As for the comments, I’m actually glad to be rid of them. I’d much rather have people reblog or email me with comments. I know it would be good for the community to make an importer to Disqus though to reduce the cost (and fear) of switching. Maybe I’ll do that next month (if someone else doesn’t do it first). (See updates.)
Just to give you guys a warning… One unfortunate side-effect of importing is that Following it blows out your Dashboard at the time when the posts were imported (this past Sunday for this blog).
I hope some people find this helpful.
Update: I added tagging all imported posts, in case people want to distinguish them from non-imported ones. I also changed the timeout to 30 minutes, so no one should have problems importing lots of posts. Thanks for the feedback, everyone!
Update 2: I moved the code to GitHub tumblr-tools.
Update 3: Disqus supposedly added Blogger comments importing. I haven’t tried it. Anyone have luck with this? Or does this only work if you’re using Disqus with Blogger?
Update 29 September 2010: Disqus added thread migration. Combined with importing Blogger comments, taking all your comments on Blogger to your new blog on Tumblr is really not far off.
Update 23 October 2012: This importer is currently not working due to Tumblr’s recent API changes. I’m working hard to fix it. Please follow this blog for further updates.
Update 1 November 2012: I’m beta testing the new importer that works with Tumblr’s new API if you’re anxious to try it.
