Importing from Blogger to Tumblr

I shared a TechCrunch article on Google Reader last week entitled "John Mayer Clarifies: Twitter Isn't Dead, Tumblr is Just Better. Join Me."  I shared it because I enjoy learning how people use technology, and especially how they market it. I didn't take the time to actually check out Tumblr.

Brooke did. She showed it to me last night, and it's great. It's simple to use and understand, provides a rich variety of options, and is heavily integrated into the social web. I've been building a custom Drupal website with similar functionality (i.e. different types of posts, etc). Instead of reinventing the wheel (although I do love learning and will still probably build my own anyway), I may just leverage Tumblr.

One thing it's natively lacking is an easy way to import from Blogger. A Tumblr user wrote a program to fix the problem. You can find it here. It asks for your Tumblr password. Before using this tool, change it to something temporary. After the import, change it back. I imported my BeforeWeGetStarted blog, but it only pulled in 25 posts. Curious, I began to investigate.

It turns out that the default Blogger RSS feed length is only 25 posts. I use FeedBurner, which is based on the default feed. To get all of my posts to import to Tumblr, I turned off FeedBurner in order to have access to the source feed. Then I typed the original Blogger source feed address in the tool, but added this custom code in the URL: ?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=200. I found that search help here.

Voila! It worked perfectly. The only problem I had was deleting the imported posts from my first two unsuccessful attempts. Tumblr doesn't have a good content management dashboard.