ninamonz:

Now that Yahoo has bought Tumblr and despite the promises, Tumblr will eventually become as bad as Yahoo is (many of you might have already noticed that before Tumblr got sold, the company already decided to deindex your mature audience targeted blog from Google.  For those of us who have loved Tumblr forever, it is time to consider our options:

1. Stay with Tumblr.  Probably the laziest option with the hope that except for some annoying advertising and minor changes, Yahoo (a profit driven, greedy, and desperate for attention enterprise) will not punish the rebellious Tumblr users.
2. Transition to WordPress.  Now if you are on Tumblr, you might be tempted to switch to WordPress, the most respected technology for blogging.  I have used its self-hosted version to run business websites (you get a domain name, pay for hosting, but then, you have complete control over everything) and also the free wordpress.com version (same platform, free, but not friendly to adult content).  If you are willing to pay the monthly charges of hosting to Godaddy, occasionally tinker with it to upgrade the software and deal with security issues, etc. that is the best way to run it, particularly if your blog has NSFW content, but remember that this will make your identity public, unless you are extremely careful and are willing to pay additional fees to hide the fact that you own the domain (by law, that data should be made public, but for a fee, some companies will let you hide behind their name).
3. Transition to Google owned blogspot.com.  This is totally free, you do not have to disclose your real name, and Google allows you to have all sorts of mature content, as long as it complies with the law, pretty much like Tumblr.  Naturally this is my favorite and I recommend it strongly.
4. Transition to another blogging platform with a new blog but leave the Tumblr intact:  You simply add messages on both blogs about your old and new address.

How to take my Tumblr blog to WordPress?

Whether you choose to host your new blog on wordpress.com or on a self-hosted domain (I will not describe the process here because it varies by what company you work with, but there is plenty of free information available online and companies like Godaddy do a pretty good job of letting you do it yourself without much trouble), the process is the same and extremely simple:

1. Log into your wordpress dashboard.
2. Click on tools on the menu.
3. Click on import.
4. Choose Tumblr.
5. You will be prompted to install the plugin, a piece of software that runs with the original program.
6. Now you will asked to associate the two accounts so that wordprss and Tumblr can talk to each other.  Follow the instructions carefully and it should be a breeze.
7. When you fill the OAuth Consumer Key and Secret Key, and hit Connect to Tumblr, you will see all your Tumblr blogs.  Simply click on Import This Blog.  If your blog is large enough, it might take hours, but eventually you will see that all the posts will be imported.

Things to watch out for:  Obviously, when you transfer the content, some of the formatting maybe lost.  You can fix that by modifying your wordpress template to resemble the Tumblr template in terms of width.  Also if you have had any internal links they will not change.  So I suggest that you leave your old Tumblr blog in place so that visitors can follow the links there.  In any case, on Tumblr you want to post a message on your sidebar that you have moved to a new location.

How to host my Tumblr blog on Blogger Blogspot?

If you do not already have a Google account or want one that does not have your real name, get a new one.  Then simply go to Blogger.com and open a new blog.  I would say that you can even create your first post, with a welcome message.  You might also want to use the layout and template tabs to make your template look as similar as possible to your Tumblr template, especially in size of the width.

How to export your Tumblr blog:  Unlike the folks at wordpress who provide a plugin that can communicate directly with Tumblr (as described above), Google does not do that.  In other words, you will need to do that yourself.  So go here and enter all the details.  Chances are that you will very soon get an XML file on your computer within minutes.  Right click this file to see how large it is and if it is less than 1 MB you are good.  Now, upload this XML file on this website to convert it to a Google friendly format.

Now in your blogger account, go to Settings —> Other and click Import Blog.  You select the converted XML file, complete the captcha, and depending on the size, all the posts will be imported.

Things to watch out for:  The transfer is good but it is likely that some of the images don’t make it or something gets bad formatting, but if you leave the original Tumblr as it is, visitors can sort of manage it.

Blogger freezes or nothing happens or complains about the file or you get error messages:  This will happen if the XML file is large, which is the case if you have images and videos.  You can then try to split your large XML file into several smaller files using this free software.  You essentially want files less than 0.5MB and then each file needs to be converted (as explained above, to a Google friendly format) and imported.  It can be a bit convoluted process but it can be done.  I found that I did not get 100% of my Tumblr but got pretty much everything with minor problems.

Final words:  Like any other move in life, this too is a bit of inconvenience and not everything will go smoothly, but eventually if you want to move on in life, you gotta do this.