This tool will create a WordPress compatible XML file from your Tumblr blog, which you can then save and import into WordPress.
Good morning! By now you'll have heard the news—or be frantically responding to the rumour thereof—that Tumblr is selling to Yahoo for a gigantic pot of money. Congratulations to them, you may think, followed by a spinal chill of panic as your mind harks back to the bloodied fates of previous Yahoo acquisitions: Geocities, Upcoming, Delicious…
Firstly, don't panic. No matter what anyone is saying on the internet, it's very unlikely that anything will change suddenly; that's not how these things work. Plus, Yahoo's intentions will be for Tumblr to be a success, and it's under new management, so you never know, it might work out. Still, regardless of what happens to the services we love in the future, it is always smart to have back-ups, so hopefully this tool can help you, whether you want to jump ship for WordPress, or just have some piece of mind.
There are a few things that you should note:
All that being said, you might still find the tool useful, and I hope you do. The code was originally written by Hao Chen, and was substantially updated by me, Ben Ward.
The source code (which, I cannot stress enough, is very old now) is on Github, if you'd like to run your own copy or make changes.
So, you're migrating your blog. Good for you! If you're running your tumblr blog on your own domain (yourdomain.com rather than me.tumblr.com, for example), then you can set up redirects from the old URLs that people are still linking to, to the imported post on your new WordPress blog.
Basically, where you have a Tumblr post URL that looks like this: http://example.com/post/12345678/this-is-a-post, the only part that matters is http://example.com/post/12345678/. That number is the ID. Everything after that gets ignored when Tumblr loads the post.
When you export your post, you're encouraged to include that post ID in the new permalink slugs, since that way you can redirect from one to the other.
If you take your current Tumblr custom domain, and host it yourself, you can set up a simple .htaccess redirect for people linking to your old posts:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^/?posts/([0-9]+).*$ http://wordpress.example.com/blog/$1