How Do I Switch Primary Blogs On Tumblr

Vinyl Answer

Every record tells a story. Here's a few stories in my collection.

Good stuff from the outskirts of NYC.

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Posted @withregram • @sunset_vinyls77 A stunning new album by beautiful beloved

Duran Duran - Future Past, reached num. 3 on UK...
Sparks - "Lil' Beethoven"

glacenoire:

vinylanswer:

Dude, this is the most innovative, crazy, creative, irritating, bizarre, funny,...
retrofret:

Just arrived a 1952 Fender Princeton 5B2 Tube Amplifier!
(please click on the link in our profile for additional information)....

I only write about vinyl and record collecting here at Vinyl Answer, but today I'll make an exception.

Like many Tumblr users, I discovered that my secondary blog (This one! Vinyl Answer) really should've been my primary blog, but Tumblr won't let users reassign blogs as primary or secondary. I spent hours digging around all over the web, trying lots of people's workarounds, like "make a second account and give the blog to that one" (well, it's still a secondary account then!), or importing and exporting posts via .xml and .php files. I kept striking out and getting ticked off. Here's what I did to solve the problem:

1. I set up a temporary Wordpress.com blog and imported my Tumblr blog into it. Wordpress has a tool for Tumblr importing—click the button and it's done for you, painlessly.

2. I went back into Tumblr and renamed Vinyl Answer to a new, temporary name so that its URL was different than before. I had to do that so that I could start a new Tumblr account with the name vinylanswer—that way, its primary account was vinylanswer.tumblr.com. If you don't rename your blog first, Tumblr will tell you that name is already taken when you try to create the account with that name.

3. Once I had the vinylanswer account all set up and confirmed (don't forget to check the confirmation email from Tumblr before going further!), I had to import the Wordpress blog back into the new Tumblr account. This was the tough part; I tried this method which apparently works for a lot of people, but for whatever reason, it didn't work for me. I kept getting errors on "line 27". I don't know anything about .php, so I couldn't figure out how to fix it, so now I was really stuck

4. At that point, I had only two choices. I could cut-and-paste every last post from one blog to the other, which would be time-consuming and meant that every post would be dated today instead of the original date I posted it (that makes a New Year's Day post weird).

The alternative was to bite the bullet and spend a few bucks. I opted for the latter—a million pages into a Google search, I found a service called import2.com, which will move a Wordpress blog to Tumblr for $12. They don't advertise it as useful for moving Tumblr-to-Tumblr via Wordpress, but they ought to, because they'd get a lot of business IMHO. Anyway, I tried their free sample conversion, which moves over 10 posts into your Tumblr blog. It worked well—with a few reservations.

To be fair, I wasn't thrilled about spending money 'cause I'm cheap, but time is money too, and given how much time I'd already wasted on this project, I plunked down the $12 via PayPal and they did the rest. They moved it all over fast and preserved the posts' original dates, so that everything didn't have today's date on it.

One major drawback is that Tumblr doesn't let people import lots of media (photos, video, audio), just text. The import2 folks have a workaround that involves Dropbox, but I couldn't really figure out what they were trying to do; it's not explained very clearly. I think your media gets hosted on Dropbox and they change your posts' coding to access the Dropbox files; I could be wrong. I didn't have that much media on my blog yet, and I couldn't be bothered to figure out what they were trying to do, so I just dropped the media into the appropriate posts on the new Tumblr version of my blog by hand.

Some minor drawbacks: All the 'likes' that my posts got previously are gone; of course, that's inevitable given that I exported to Wordpress, but it's worth mentioning. Another irritation was that after I did the free sample export—but before I decided to spend the $12—I made some changes to the newly-imported Tumblr posts (i.e. I re-added their photos). When I finally paid for the full import, import2 re-imported the entire blog, so all those changed posts were replaced by old versions again. It was a drag when I discovered I'd been wasting my time and had to add photos again.

But overall, using import2 was a good experience; not having to move the posts myself by cut-and-paste—and preserving the original post dates—was huge. To me, it was easily worth the $12; YMMV, but anyone with more than a few dozen posts would probably find it worth their while to use the service.

Of Note: You have to give import2 your password so that their system can log into your Tumblr account and move everything in—I had some qualms about that. They say they don't keep the info (nor should they!), but I changed my password when they were done anyway.

As a final thought—if you're reading this, you're probably not a regular visitor to my blog. Do me a favor and look around; discover what I really blog about (Records! Vinyl! Music!)…and if you dig a post, gimmie a "like" or two; or even better, reblog this post so that someone else with this problem will find it. And good luck with your blog transfer!

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