Mike Industries

I’ve been using Del.icio.us, the fabulous Joshua Schachter creation, as my linkrolling tool for a few years now. Although it can be a powerful tool for organizing and browsing through interesting URLs, I find I only use it for two things: saving links and displaying said links in the sidebar of Mike Industries. For that reason, there are probably any number of bookmarking services which would amply serve my meager needs.

One service that’s caught my eye recently is the increasingly popular Tumblr. I have friends who run their main blogs off of it and others who just run one of their multiple blogs off of it. I still like hosting my own WordPress blog and would never outsource this to a hosted service, but at the same time, running all linkblogging activity through a service like Tumblr sounds appealing — especially considering I can then pull all of that activity into my main blog using something like WP-O-Matic.

The super nice thing about Tumblr is how simple the posting interface is. The “Share on Tumblr” bookmarklet the company provides does a pretty good job of automatically figuring out what type of content you’re posting and treating it accordingly. In other words, if you seed from a YouTube page, the link gets posted as type “video” and is displayed accordingly. These sorts of interface niceties reduce the amount of work required to save links and thus encourage more linking activity. Both good things. The woefully inadequate “Press This” bookmarklet from WordPress just doesn’t measure up.

So… a couple of days ago when I decided I wanted to migrate all of my Del.icio.us bookmarks over to Tumblr, I couldn’t for the life of me find an automated way to do it. Tumblr has an import feeds feature but it is misleadingly named. It doesn’t actually import existing feeds. It only adds your feed URL and then posts any new items you add afterwards. This does nothing to aid in the migration of existing content over to Tumblr.

Using a combination of the Tumblr API sample code and some code I stole from Greg Neustaetter, I created a PHP script which imports all of your existing Del.icio.us bookmarkets into Tumblr.

Warning: I am not a PHP genius so I know the code isn’t pretty… but it works. It imported all 312 of my Del.icio.us bookmarks in under a minute.

In case you’re interested, here’s how to do it (caveat — you might want to do this on a fresh Tumblr account, just to be sure):

1. Log into your Del.icio.us account.
2. Hit http://del.icio.us/api/posts/all and save the file to your desktop as “delicious.xml”. Upload this file to your server.
3. Upload Delicious-To-Tumblr.php to the same location on your server and edit the two lines in the file specifying your Tumblr email and password (to authenticate with the Tumblr API).
4. Hit Delicious-To-Tumblr.php in your web browser and all of your entries will be imported.

Voila! Del.icio.us-to-Tumblr migration in about a minute. Enjoy.

No matter what your political leanings are, today is a special day. Above is my favorite poster from the presidential campaign. It was beautifully illustrated and silkscreened by The Date Farmers to help get out the vote in Texas… complete with authentic Mexican Revolution motif. I believe this is the only known depiction of Barack Obama where he looks reasonably badass.

Really, really beautiful.