Ok this has been interesting, when tumblr came back from 20 hrs of downtime i just had to move my blog. I never want to go through that again!!! Of course now ive gone through the effort to move WordPress will probably crash – thats life im afraid.

So i learned a couple of things during this migration process.

Firstly the way to get the bulk of the work done was to use a utility – http://benapps.net – just typed in my tumblr blog name and it created a wordpress xml file for me. It was really easy to import this straight into wordpress and this too all of 10 mins; but there were issues.

1. imbedded videos within tumblr just didnt work properly.
2. images were not imported literally i am linking back to tumblr at the moment but i may fix that – when i do i will amend this post – im thinking after ive tidied things i can export my blog again – and do a bulk search and replace on the tumblr paths – i may have to write a little application to help me here
3. because i dont have a custom domain the image paths will have to change. Im thinking of doing something about that. Not having a custom domain means i have to keep my tumblr active – because the urls were automatically posted to facebook and twitter from my tumblr address. in retrospect this was dumb of me.
4. some of the posts really need reformatting – images are just slapped into the xml feels and look much nicer in wordpress if you resize and justify them
5. in tumblr if your creating a photo entry i didnt always put titles in.
6. there seems to be trouble with audio entries.

i took a look at maybe using the images that are dumped into a folder by the tumblr backup program for the mac but that didnt really help me. the filenames that are used by the download tools are not the same as on the website.

What i am thinking of doing is downloading the wordpress xml, and writing a parser to pull out all the tumblr entries, rename the url in the xml feed, and and dump the images into i a directory.

WordPress seems to allow you to upload media files en masse, which is incredibly useful in this case. i was also wondering if i can use the rss feed from tumblr, but it seems that tumblr has dissabled RSS and are still having some problems. i will write the tool this evening!