thebestsophist / tumblrtoxml

Turning your Tumblr archive into a single XML file.

Tumblr to XML

This takes a Tumblr archive generated with tumblr-rb and turns it into a single XML file using Jekyll.

Requirements

• Rubygems
• tumblr-rb
• Jekyll

Instructions

1. If you have not done so, install tumblr-rb with the command gem install tumblr-rb

2. Clone this repo:

    git clone https://github.com/thebestsophist/tumblrtoxml.git
   

3. Enter the directory and download your tumblr archive to _posts

    $ TUMBLRHOST=yourbloghere.tumblr.com tumblr backup _posts/
   

4. Update the yaml front matter in index.xsl with your blog details.

5. Enter the _posts directory and rename the archived posts to something jekyll will like:

    $ find *.txt -exec bash -c 'mv "$0" "2013-10-05-${0%\.txt}.markdown"' {} \;
   

You can replace the date 2013-10-05 with any date you prefer, jekyll requires it, but it is not used in the generated XML file. I prefer to use the date of import.

1. Mass replace id: with tumblrid:

[Need a good command for this that only matches the id: in the yaml front matter, I currently just use a mass-repace app.]

1. Edit the YAML front matter in archive.xml to match your site.

2. Return to your jekyll root and build the xml file:

    $ jekyll build
   

Jekyll will still build individual pages for your posts, you can ignore those, the important file is _site/archive.xml which will be a single XML.

Notes

• Since Tumblr is terrible at generating clean XHTML, post contents are shoved into a <![CDATA[]>. You may need to clean up the data a little more if you plan on using it to generate your sites.
• Since XML is more strict with special characters, you may have to go through and clean your ampersands, smart quotes and such.