There are an increasing number of people who love to use Tumblr as a blogging platform. As blogs go, Tumblr is flexible, stylish and easy to use. Many people use it simply as a light-hearted way to repost their favourite images, while others have taken to using Tumblr as more of a lifestream. Those people in the latter group may have noticed something annoying Tumblr did last year – they stopped letting you import RSS feeds to Tumblr.
In an attempt to ensure they could provide Tumblr’s core services to the massive number of users they have, Tumblr made a decision to cut RSS imports to new Tumblr blogs. Older blogs with RSS imports have mostly had the imports kept functional, but no new RSS imports can be added. That is, not without outside help – help in the form of TumblRSS.
Why On Earth Would I Import RSS Anyway?
Okay, so maybe you’re wondering why people would want to import RSS feeds to Tumblr in the first place. The lifestream example is the best one: some people just want a blog to share with friends and family which collects all the best things they do online into the one place.
For instance, collecting a few of their best photos from Flickr, book reviews from Goodreads, movie reviews from Flixter and blog posts from their WordPress blog. A Tumblr like this would be ideal to show relatives and friends who just want to see the equivalent of an online snapshot. But to do this, the user requires RSS feeds to be imported to Tumblr. They need TumblRSS.
Get Started With TumblRSS
Logging into TumblRSS is simple as you merely authenticate with your Tumblr account and allow TumblRSS to access your Tumblr blog. Don’t worry about it showing you just your primary Tumblr blog, since later you will be given the option to choose which blog to import RSS into.
When you first click on “Get Started” it will ask you to provide an email address so that you can be uniquely identified in the system. To avoid problems, ensure this matches the email address you use for Tumblr.
Importing An RSS Feed To Tumblr
The RSS import is straight forward to set up. All you need to do is choose which blog to import to, choose whether to import text or links and insert the RSS feed’s URL.
Limitations
- Any photos in the feed will be inserted as if part of a text post at this stage, however the developer hopes to add full support for photo feeds in the future.
- TumblRSS doesn’t yet support importing tags, but they hope to add this feature soon.
- RSS imports into Tumblr are limited to 100 posts per day. Currently the TumblRSS application is blocked for any user who reaches that limit, so it’s best to avoid hitting it.
- If you later change the Tumblr’s URL, the RSS import will be broken and you will need to set it up again. This is because TumblRSS sees the blog as an entirely different blog. There’s no unique identifier for Tumblr blogs other than their name.
Despite TumblRSS’s limitations, it still provides a useful service that Tumblr doesn’t currently provide. I look forward to the proposed improvements eagerly.
Do you import an RSS feed into Tumblr? Why? Do you think Tumblr should re-introduce the ability to import RSS or should it be left to developers like TumblRSS?
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