Tumblr has a JSON API [1] that is fairly usable, and provides access to the essential parts of blogs (and terms of use explicitly allow building data portability applications on it, which is a nice touch). It's not instant-export, and I get the impression nobody uses it so it might not be rock solid, but if you need to export data, it's possible.
This tumblr2wordpress tool is probably built on it. So is Jekyll's tumblr importer. Honestly, the lack of export tools for Tumblr probably comes less from a lack of demand than anything else.
[1] http://www.tumblr.com/docs/en/api/v2 [2] https://github.com/mojombo/jekyll/blob/master/lib/jekyll/mig...
Re:The Web We Lost
by icebraining on Thursday December 13, 2012 @06:34PM
(#4918762)
As far as I'm concerned, there's already two formats: RSS and ATOM. One can "export" a Tumblr blog by simply appending /rss to the URLs.
That seems to only provide the newest 20 posts.
If RSS went all the way back to the beginning, then you'd be right, it would get you 99% of the way there.
Re:The Web We Lost
by icebraining on Thursday December 13, 2012 @06:53PM
(#4918826)
You can append /rss to the pages, e.g. http://[blog].tumblr.com/page/2/rss
It'd be nice if they supported <link rel="next"> tags, but it's still extremely easy to dump the content.
It would be nice if there were a standard format for storing blog posts and their metadata and attachments, so you could move from anything to anything. Perhaps the nascent Tent protocol[3] could do that when it's mature.
1. http://smarterware.org/8026/why-not-tumblr
2. http://tumblr2wordpress.benapps.net/
3. https://tent.io