Selecting to use an existing audio file appears to not allow you to choose MP3. Anyone else seeing this issue?

-153 down from yesterday.  Somebody stopped following me too, that was a bit odd.

Tumblarity is such a strange thing, and lacks any rhyme or reason as to how it is calculated.  I think it was Warren Ellis who stated that, in a way, it’s brilliant, because it’s basically this Tamagotchi number.  You want to build it up, see it grow.  It drops?  Oh no, it’s dying!  What can I do to help it?

Pfft.

How much does it really mean when I look at my number, and it lists me at the top of the list for that number.  Guess what, it does that for everybody.  Does it help my blog get more exposure?  Is there any kind metrics available regarding this?

So the best thing is to just ignore it and just focus on the content you want to put out. You’ll connect with people who dig your stuff (or vice versa) regardless of that magic little number.

And so on…

lesmy:

High-school dropout and Tumblr founder David Karp is doing a presentation today at the Eventoblog conference in sunny Sevilla, Spain. In one of his first slides, Karp shared some statistics about Tumblr, which appears to be growing pretty well, pretty quickly.

Last August, the Tumblr team shared some growth statistics and claimed 50 million visitors and a healthy 255 million impressions in July 2009. This month (which I reckon is not actually this month but rather October), Tumblr self-reports 20 million unique vistors and 420 million impressions.

This means either Tumblr lost about 30 million unique monthly visitors in the past few months, or there’s some mix-up about what’s being measured exactly and shared publicly (visits vs. visitors, perhaps?). But third-party measuring services like Compete acknowledge that traffic numbers are definitely heading in the right direction.

According to Karp, Tumblr is currently seeing 2 million Tumblr bloggers publish about 40 million new posts per month. About 10,000 new people sign up for Tumblr every day on average, and the retention rate is very high: close to 85% remains active after registering for the micro-blogging service (note that Tumblr, besides drop-dead simple, is free of charge).

And as you can tell from the picture I took of one of his slides, 35% use Tumblr on Facebook, while only 15% connects the service to Twitter. The bookmarklet is relatively popular too, with about one third of Tumblr’s users installing it. About 15% downloads the company’s iPhone application (which is admittedly really good).

Very interesting stuff regarding the “business” side of Tumblr.

It’s been about a month (I guess; too lazy to look back and verify) since I migrated Vox Bomb to Tumblr.  In that month, I’ve noticed an interesting shift in the way I’ve managed the blog.

Because Tumblr is a giant, eclectic community, there is a lot of information and media to be found, and with the number of people I’ve followed, there’s never a shortage of interesting things to discover and share.  Tumblr excels at this, better than most other blogging sites I’ve used (such as LiveJournal or Blogger).  It’s blogging for the Twitter crowd and those with ADHD.  It’s the most “social” blogging platform I’ve seen.  Short bursts of thought, pictures, quotes, and music.  Occasionally, there’s the longer piece.

Before, I would get stuck for things to write about.  Sometimes, there’d be great weeks; if I was reading a lot of books and discovering new tunes, I’d have plenty of material to draw from.  But sometimes, due to work and life, I’d get into a reading funk or can’t listen to as much music.  That’s where the grind can kick in and you wonder what to write about.   Before I’d average about a post a day, maybe two.  Now, I’ve adapted to the prevalent style on Tumblr, namely bite-sized posts.  I try to vary the posts; I’ll see if there are two or three posts that I’ll reblog from people I follow.  I’ll intermix that with two or three posts of my own, either my photography, the latest column over at Inside the Circle, links, videos, reviews, or music.  I’ve taken the tagline for the blog - Marauding the Pop Culture Hive Mind - and pushed it to its logical conclusion.  The stream of pop culture and media, of things I find interesting, has formed the core of Vox Bomb.  In a way, it’s liberating, since I find it easier to share stuff and in a way, being more “me”.  It’s harder, though, because I can’t gauge how well others are receiving it.  It’s also hard because I need to balance it with thought pieces and content longer than a sentence or two.

I don’t regret moving to Tumblr; in fact, it has been a boon and very convenient.  It hooks into Twitter and Facebook with ease; it’s dead easy to capture information quickly thanks to the bookmarklet I use in Google Chrome; and I don’t have to mess with plug-ins and upgrades.  I get way, way more discussion regarding my posts on Facebook than I ever did before with WordPress + WordBook.

So, for those reading, please provide feedback.  How do you like (or not like) the changes?  I am open to all feedback.  Don’t be shy. ;-)

haymuff:

staceey:

yourstonight:

prostitutionisrevolution:

-chasingthewind:

thingshavechanged:

piniyopo:

searchingforalana:

onyourworstdays:

A Tumblr to Remember.

NeverShoutTumblr

Tumblr! at the Disco ;)

The Academy Tumblr…

Family Force Tumblr

tumblrCYDE

Forever the Sickest Tumblr.

Tumblr Radio

Tumblr Observatory

I Love You But I’ve Chosen Tumblr

So here we are… I have moved and set up shop at Tumblr.  I can’t help but be reminded of my buddy Allyn Gibson… how he (and myself, to be honest) love to tweak with WordPress themes and looks, I seem to like to move from provider to provider.  I would drive my old friend Rachael crazy, who specializes on SEO for websites.

The latest move was driven more by my recent lack of updates.  WordPress is great and flexible, and I can have my Twitter updates and latest listened tracks display in the sidebar, but at the end of the day, WordPress is a lot of tinkering and upkeep.  And after a while, you can get focused on that aspect of the site as opposed to what really matters:  the content.

And I had started to get back to the content; after a light month of posts, I started to get back into a semi-regular routine of updating Vox Bomb.  But I wanted to shake things up even further.  Part of that involved taking co-worker and all-around cool guy Brad’s suggestion and opening up a Disqus account for comments; I imported all the comments from the WordPress site into the new Disqus account for preservation.   Moving forward, I will be using Disqus for all blog commentary.  It just makes sense to have a “blog neutral” system for comments (much in the same way I use another site for hosting images; this makes migration so much easier). Thanks Brad!

When I finally decided to migrate to Tumblr, there were a few key obstacles to overcome:

• There is no direct method of importing WordPress posts into Tumblr.
• I wanted to preserve all the tags associated with the WordPress posts as they were transferred over.
• I did not want previous comments lost.

The final point was resolved with Disqus, but what of the other two?

In the end, I wound up being able to do this, but it was a bit involved.  It entailed exporting my WordPress site to Blogger, then using a special online tool to migrate the Blogger site to Tumblr.

Here’s what I did:

1. Export your WordPress blog to an XML file.  For self-hosted WordPress sites, after logging in to your WordPress account, go to the Dashboard, and down along the sidebar you will see the Tools link.  Click on this, and you will see an Export option.  It’s pretty straightforward after this.
2. If your XML file is less than 1MB in size, you can go to this site in order to convert the WordPress XML file into a Blogger-compatible XML file.  Then go to step 4.
3. If your XML file is larger than 1MB in size, you’ll need to try the following. Bear in mind that you can probably do the following in less steps, but I am going to explain how I did it, what worked best for me, and you can adjust from there.  
   • It would be best if you had a text editor that can deal with multiple, large files easily; I’m partial to Crimson Editor.  Also, make a backup copy of your WordPress XML file.
   • Take your XML file and open it in your editor of choice.  You’ll see a bunch of text at the beginning explaining what the XML file is.  As you scroll down, you’ll see comments / syntax, and you’ll see your blog information (such as title, etc.), along with the categories and tags listed.  Scroll down through your listed tags until you see the line <item>.  This signifies the beginning of your posts in the XML file.  What you’ll want to do is take everything from the beginning of the XML file down to just before the first <item> listing and copy that to a new text file.  Call it whatever you want; I’ll be using the name xmltemplate.txt for this article.
   • Scroll down to the very bottom of your XML file.  You’ll see the last two lines are </channel> and </rss> (on separate lines).  Copy these two lines to the end of your xmltemplate.txt file (hit enter a few times to leave space between these two lines and the larger block of text you copied in the previous step).  Save this file.
   • Keep your WordPress XML file open.  Copy the contents of your xmltemplate.txt file to a new text file.
   • Now, remember that first <item> heading we found earlier in your WordPress XML file?  What you’ll want to do is start copying from that point (including the <item>) on down.  How much you copy depends on how large your XML file is; what you’re looking to do is create a new XML file that is less than 1MB in size so that you can import it to be translated to a format Blogger can understand.  So if your WordPress file is 2MB in size, you may need to create 2 or 3 smaller XML files using this process. What is critical is that you end your selected text at an </item> tag, which denotes the end of a post, before copying.
   • Take the text you just copied and paste it into your new file containing the xmltemplate information.  You will want to paste it in just before the </channel> tag, in those extra returns I told you to enter earlier.
   • Save this new file with a .xml extension (WP1.xml, for example). Make sure that it is not greater than 1MB in size.
   • Repeat the above steps, taking the text from your xmltemplate.txt file and pasting it into a new text file, and then copying posts from where you left off in the WordPress XML file beginning with the <item> tag.  Remember: always start copying at an <item> tag, and end your selected text at an </item> tag.
   • Once you are done breaking your WordPress XML out into smaller files, you can go to this site in order to convert the WordPress XML files into Blogger-compatible XML files.  Note:  after converting a file, verify the size of the new XML file.  It should be comparable in size to its counterpart WordPress XML file.  If the resulting Blogger XML file is tiny (around 1K), open the file up in a text editor and you should see it contains an error.  This means that the XML file you tried converting was improperly formatted.  You will need to go back and double-check that you followed the above steps correctly, fix any missing tags, and try converting it again.
4. Go to the Blogger Dashboard. If you do not have a Blogger account, set one up.  Otherwise, create a new, basic blog.  Once created, go into its Settings.  Under the Basics heading, you’ll see a link near the top that says Import Blog.  Click on this, and follow the instructions to choose the Blogger-compatible XML file you created in step 2 or 3.  Make sure to check the box Automatically publish all imported posts.  Once you click the Import Blog button, it will take a few moments for the process to complete.  Once it has finished, click on the Dashboard and verify that the blog entries have been properly published and retained all the tags.  If you have multiple XML files to import, repeat this process until you have imported all of your posts.
5. Once your temporary Blogger site is ready, go to this site, which is an online tool for importing Blogger sites into Tumblr.  Follow the straightforward on-screen instructions to complete your journey.  Note: for those uncomfortable with supplying your Tumblr password, just change it beforehand and change it back after the process is complete.  That’s what I did.
6. And now you should be done.

One tip:  make sure that you turn off the option to send updates to Twitter before you import your posts.  Outside of tweeting a number of old posts, I unwittingly went over my Twitter limit because I forgot to turn off this option before the import.

And there’s my experience with moving over from WordPress to Tumblr.  I’ll probably be tweaking this “guide” in the future; if you find it useful, feel free to drop me a line.  If you have any tips / suggestions, let me know and I’ll update the guide accordingly.