Tumblr is the best blogging platform I’ve ever used, but I won’t say that I’ve never been frustrated by it.
This is the second part of a two part series about Tumblr. The other post can be found here.
Over the past few years I’ve been casting about trying to find the best site creation tools. After trying Freeway, Dreamweaver, iWeb, Squarespace, Wordpress, Blogger, Virb, and Posterous. I’ve finally settled down and decided upon Tumblr as my long term home. The thing is, tumblr was one of the first tools I tried. So why did I keep experimenting with so many different services after I’d already found the platform for me?
The inability to import or export from a tumblr blog has been the main reason and, frankly, I’m not sure that, without this feature, I’ll ever be 100% comfortable with the decision.
A blogging platform that doesn’t provide easy ways to import and export a complete blog archive is like a landlord adding provisions to your lease saying that they get to keep all of your belongings when you move out. Regardless how great the place is that you are moving into, that’s got to give you pause.
Now, to be fair, Tumblr isn’t that bad.
They did recently announce a new backup utility to try and address this issue, but I think it falls short in one, seemingly small, but key area.
The backup utility is a desktop application that you download to your computer. Give it your Tumblr user name and password, and it proceeds to download every last aspect of your blog. This is an important point. Unlike other exporters that I’ve used which just download the text of your posts and leave it up to you to find a new home for, and re-link to all your images, movies, and music, tumblr’s app creates a backup that includes all of your content. Your audio files, image files, theme files, everything downloads right along with the text of your posts and meta data. That’s great. It really is. After all, what good is moving your blog to a new platform if suddenly the links to all of your media become broken? So the backup generator takes care of that fairly common and maddening problem and does it well.
Where this solution falls short is that the app does seem to be just a backup generator, not an exporter. This means what you end up with isn’t a file that can be imported into your new platform of choice, instead you get a folder full of static html pages that you could upload to your own hosting. This would create a functioning online archive of all your content from your previous tumblr blog. You are then free to start a new blog of the same name on some other service but your archives from that point on are going to remain forever a completely separate site from your new posts.
There are larger problems with this than are immediately obvious, namely, links.
Links are the lifeblood of your site. Links are how people discover your work. The number of links you have coming in determines how easy it is for others to find your site with a search engine.
With the exporting method tumblr has in place now, if you ever decide to leave their service every link you have ever received to your content suddenly becomes broken. This is not some sinister plan they have devised to lock you into their service. Everyone at Tumblr seems amazingly nice and determined to make the best user experience possible for us. It’s just the way it works out right now.
Here’s why:
On John Grubers site daringfireball.net he formats the urls for his posts like this:
http://daringfireball.net/linked/2009/12/11/tshirts-last-chance
When you first look at that url it seems like nonsense, just random words and numbers, if you look again there is a method to how he does it. He has his bloging platform list things in this order: his domain name / the name of a folder on his site that contains the post / then the year / month / day the post was made / and the title of the post.
It’s not really important if any of his users realize that’s how his urls are structured. What’s important is that it’s structured in a way that Gruber understands and can dupiclate on another platform if he decides to move his site someday. He could export his blog from Moveable Type which he uses now and import it into Wordpress, tell Wordpress to format the post urls in the exact same way, and not experience a single broken link.
Now let’s look at the urls that Tumblr automatically generates for it’s posts.
http://thedaysarelongandshort.com/post/277031979/to-go-back-in-time
Here we’ve got: my domain name, a folder titled post, and then where the heck does “277031979” come from? I have no idea. It seems to be a randomly generated number, different for every post and virtually impossible to recreate using another platform. I’ve got no way to alter this URL from my end and no way to recreate it if I ever leave. Even the backup utility I just wrote about doesn’t create urls exactly like this.
In the end, I have so much fun using Tumblr that I decided to take a chance and hope they address these issues in the future. There are a few workarounds for this problem as well, none of them perfect. I may write about them in the future. For now however, I’m done with my Tumblr rant. If you have any questions or I got something wrong just let me know. I’d love to hear from you.
