Mar
15
How to move your blog to tumblr
I just moved my blog from Blogger to tumblr and the first thing I did was search for a site that gave me all the details on how to do this. I couldn’t find one, so here are the steps I went through for those of you that may want to do the same thing. If you know of a better way to do this, let me know!
At first this seems pretty straight forward, but there are few gotchas like moving your old posts over to your new blog and keeping your RSS subscribers. The later is particularly troublesoom if you use a custom domain like I do (aaronbird.net rather than aaron-bird.tumblr.com).
- Create a tumblr blog.
- Import your old posts from your old blog to tumblr - This way you migrate all your old content with you. This is specific to the blogging platform you are moving from. Since I moved from Blogger, a quick search yeilded this tool to import my old posts.
- Add your analytics tracking to your tumblr blog - This ensures that you keep tracking data in the new blog. I use Google Analytics, so I followed these instructions. In addition, for those of you like me that use a customer domain for your blog, you will want to use analytics to track when people have mostly stopped going to your old blog.
- If you don’t have one already, create a feedburner feed. This will enable you to keep your RSS subscribers during the move. Note that you will want to use your new tumblr rss as the “originial feed”. Below are my settings as an example.
- Update your rss links on your tumblr blog to point to the new feedburner feed - This ensures that new subscribes use your feedburner feed and not your tumblr one. I’m assuming you want to use feedburner as your feed (rather than tumblr). I like this as it will make it much easier if I need to move my blog again, as my feed URL won’t change when my blog changes (the problem I ran into when moving from Blogger to tumblr). Feedburner also gives you a bunch of nice analytics features. Here are instructions for updaing the RSS links on your tumblr blog. Note that f you change you theme, you will need to do this again. Does anyone know how to edit the tumblr {RSS} variable? That would be an easier solution.
- Redirect your old feed to the feedburner feed - Again, I moved from Blogger, so here is how I did it, your blog may be different. From the admin page in Blogger -> Setting tab -> Publishing -> Site Feed -> Post Publishing URL - set this to your new Feedburner URL. This is key as it will redirect all of the subscribers on your old blog to your new Feedburner feed. That way you won’t loose any subscribers, and the migration will be transparent to them.
- Move your custom domain to tumblr - If you use a custom domain name (like I do), this becomes a little tricky as most of my subscribers are getting my old blogger feed with my custom domain (www.aaronbird.net/feeds/posts/default), which thanks to step (6) now redirects to feeds.feedburner.com/aaronbird. However, when I move my DNS record to point to tumblr (from Blogger), tumblr won’t serve a feed from /feeds/posts/default, in fact, they’ll serve a 404. So, here is my workaround:
- Blog a post on both blogs telling people to update their feeds to the new feedburner url.
- Wait some time to move the DNS over to tumblr (when you’re ready, here are the instructions). I’ll use feedburner’s analytics to tell me when most people are coming directly to the feed (rather than the redirect from Blogger). And when that is the case, I’ll move the DNS record over to tumblr (and complete the move).
Done!
