For a while now I’ve been using Tumblr. I tried to direct people to the environment over there because I love the community and the workflow and frankly the design just works. I can use it from my phone with no effort, and people can share the work in a very smooth and easy fashion. here is the problem. I had a nagging feeling that by pawning people off of my personally owned site and onto another service I was producing content and sharing bits of awesome with little to no feedback to my site. I did the analytics, and despit automatically posting the episodes onto Tumblr I would only get 1 or 2 people clicking through to the site. not really worth the duplication.
However I found a ton of good stories over there, funny little one off jokes, and lulz beyond imagining. I wanted to continue to participate in tumblr while having the awesome work show up on this site. Not an easy task to do it right. In fact it was a pain. So like any good tech, I’ll show you how you do it.
Easy Peasy
- On WordPress install the Feedwordpress Plugin, Be careful. This is a firehose. it is a great way to aggregate content, funneling all manner of RSS feeds into one blog. But it needs a bit of help with Tumblr.
- Create an account on feedburner, throw your Tumblr Feed into this. I’ll Explain all the tech details later.
- Drop the feedburner feed into the plugin and set the options on each menu.
- Post to tumblr, Enjoy on your blog!
Why the extra step?
I know what you are saying. Paul why bother with the extra step? Why do i need to use a 4th party service to process the feed. it works just fine in Google reader, and everything else. Well I tied plugging the feed directly into Feedwordpress, and it would only update the content from the previous day. Nothing new, until midnight struck… the blog turned into a pumpkin. Well not really, but the feed was squashed…
That pun hurt me worse than you, I swear
Here is what I really think. when you look at Tumblr the posts are individual, but they seem to be grouped by date, a very logical configuration, except they don’t “close” the day out until the clock strike midnight. So some feed readers see the open ended attribute and can’t deal. Feedwordpress included. However Google is Smart… much smarter than I by pushing the feed through Feedburner it sanitizes the data and allows for nice pretty formatting.
I tried a couple other plugins to get the Tumblr feed through. Feed2Post, didn’t pull in HTML, so video embeds were lost, and I couldn’t get a couple other ones to work at all. FeedWordpress is a beautiful plugin and still in development, give it a go.. Let me know what you think of the process, the new content and the fun button I placed on the right hand side of the page directing you to the podcast. If you can’t find it I need to a brighter yellow, and I hate Yellow.
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