The Great Tumblr Hack
Posted at 4:15 pm on Saturday, August 23, 2008, in Uncategorized, and tagged tumblr.
Tumblr, the blogging platform of choice for wanna-be hipsters, has a closed database. Meaning, when (and if) you want to leave the service, you cannot take your content with you (at least not easily). Where there is a demand, a person (or persons) will undoubtedly eventually serve that demand.
In comes the great Tumblr hack -- a free, painless tool that scrapes your Tumblr account and packages it for import into WordPress or (Movable Type). The thing is, you don't need to own a Tumblr account to use this tool. In fact, you can scrape any Tumblr, provided you know their username (e.g., username.tumblr.com).
Tumblr does not currently act to prevent this scraping, by way of a unique code needed to facilitate such scraping, but they do not allow private posts to be scraped, which is a good thing. But, if you'd like to replicate any person's Tumblr, or take every entry of any given Tumblr, here is your chance.