

Why Not Tumblr - twapi
http://smarterware.org/8026/why-not-tumblr

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jgroome
No backups. Unreliable uptime. And of course, no self-hosted option.

If you invest yourself in your blog and take time out of your life to maintain
it properly then it's not unreasonable to expect control over your work. If
Tumblr goes down for half a day then that means nobody can visit your site,
and if you have something that needs to be posted as a matter of urgency then
you're stuffed until it comes back up.

Plus, what happens when Tumblr goes out of business?

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wzdd
This is a bit strange. I migrated my blog from Tumblr about a year ago, and at
the time there was an easy-to-use XML API to retrieve posts -- presumably the
one that powers the many "hacky third party tools that purport to do it".

I suppose it is disconcerting that Tumblr don't just let you export your data
from the dashboard, but it's not at all difficult to do, and it's not at all
hacky.

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pavel_lishin
It's not difficult or hacky to you - but you read and comment on HN.

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pointlessjon
Totally agree with both of you.

Tumblr is one of the simplest api's I have ever worked with, though. To decide
not to use it because there isn't some one-click dashboard csv export or
migration tool.. that's such a weird decision. That's like saying I don't want
to use [redacted social networking site] because it doesn't feature [one-
click-tool] to move to [alternative redacted social networking site]. I mean,
I guess. But, if your concern is about ownership of the data and you're
treating their service/app as a datasource, I'm sorry but you're going to have
to get your hands a _little_ dirty to export that data into your preferred
format.

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duck
Setup pingdom (or another monitoring service) on a Tumblr site and you can
witness the other bigger issue with them.

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_delirium
If you consider Tumblr to fill some of the same space as Twitter (albeit in a
more media-rich way), it has roughly "industry-standard" uptime. =]

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iloveprettycode
I don't see what's wrong with "hacky third party tools". From the looks of it,
the api seems to allow for you to pull your posts, 50 at a time.

However, it is a bit concerning that there is no built in tool for laymen. It
seems like tumblr needs more hires.

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brown9-2
I think the worry is that the third party tools might stop working at any time
and/or the company might pull or change the API that allows it to function. If
it was an official feature from the company, it's continued existence would be
a bit more assured (although not perfect).

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bobds
Tumblr also has some other awesome features you may not have noticed.

My favourite is tag pages only up to 15. So if you have 300 items under a
given tag, you can only sort of see 225 (at 15 items per page).

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superchink
<http://cl.ly/3s1g0z2S3Y2n3e1L0q3U>

Someone else might find this screenshot quite ironic. A response article, "Why
Tumblr" and Tumblr failing to display it.

