Remember Tumblrize? If you’re looking for a WordPress to Tumblr crossposter, the new Tumblr Crosspostr WordPress plugin is for you:
Tumblr Crosspostr posts to Tumblr whenever you hit the “Publish” (or “Save Draft”) button. It uses Tumblr’s simple API to keep posts in sync; when you edit your WordPress post, it updates your Tumblr post. Private WordPress posts become private Tumblr posts, deleting a post from WordPress that you’ve previously cross-posted to Tumblr deletes it from Tumblr, too, and so on. Scheduling a WordPress post to be published any time in the future will add it to the Tumblr blog’s Queue. (However, the publishing schedule of your Tumblr queue will take precedence, so be careful!)
Tumblr Crosspostr is very lightweight. It just requires you to connect to your Tumblr account from the plugin options screen. After that, you’re ready to cross-post!
Check out the Tumblr Crosspostr screenshots. You can send bug reports to me on GitHub. Like the plugin? Show your appreciation by rating it highly, and donating here.
Enjoy it! And read on if you’re interested in some of my personal thoughts on plugin development, corporate APIs, and snark.
Editorial: The rise and fall of Tumblrize, and its rebirth as Tumblr Crosspostr
Some years ago, I made significant contributions to a WordPress plugin called Tumblrize. When I first found it, it was a basic cross-posting plugin that sent your WordPress posts to Tumblr. It only supported a few of Tumblr’s post types but it was reliable enough that I started using it as a backend to one of my most popular Tumblr blogs, MaleSubmissionArt.com.
Using WordPress with the Tumblrize plugin as a backend to post to Tumblr turned out to be extraordinarily useful. For one thing, it gave me an extremely portable backup of my Tumblr blog as I was creating it, because the original content of my Tumblr blog was itself generated from my WordPress posts. (WordPress blogs can be imported and exported almost any which way, while Tumblr has yet to provide any official tool to let you export your Tumblr content from their proprietary system). But it also let me take advantage of WordPress’s powerful multi-user and workflow capabilities to create Tumblr posts.
Turns out, I didn’t really realize how beloved or widely used Tumblrize was. When I hit the road and told employers and capitalists alike to go kill themselves, I stopped maintaining Tumblrize because I just didn’t need it anymore. Meanwhile, Tumblr retired the version of their API that Tumblrize supported and the plugin stopped working. There was a bunch of griping and moaning about it, but no one who offered to pay me to update the plugin actually followed through. (Gods, never trust a capitalist.)
But the other day, Tumblr updated their Terms of Service. In typical corpocratic style, it’s condescending and dismissive and basically full of shit. And if you don’t agree to the new terms, you have to politely request an archive of your content before they’ll actually give it to you. Some folks on Twitter have been waiting for days. That’s not just shitty, it’s also possibly illegal.
It’s like I first wrote when they started including their “Web in-stream” ads into user’s dashboards: Fuck. That. Corporate. Shit.
Long story short(er), this pissed me off. And I realized that while I’m still using Tumblr, making manual backups is kind of a pain. I’d much rather just, y’know, not have my critical content controlled by people who don’t give a shit about me. All companies are like that. Yahoo!, the owners of Tumblr, especially.
Very little is as motivating to me as being pissed off by something some shitty corporation is doing. So over the past three days, I re-wrote Tumblrize from scratch. The new version, also renamed to Tumblr Crosspostr, does everything Tumblrize used to do with Tumblr and then some. Both private posts and drafts are now supported, as is the Tumblr queue feature. The settings have been streamlined and the whole thing is localizable, so if you’d like to see Tumblr Crosspostr translated into your language, sign up to be a translator on the Tumblr Crosspostr Transifex project page.
I hope you enjoy using Tumblr Crosspostr. But most of all, I hope you start advocating for your basic digital rights. Terms of Service contracts are downright bullshit, and you should break, reject, and otherwise protest every single last line in every single last one of them as much as you possibly can. You should advocate for technologies that give you control over your use of it, and your data. And perhaps most of all, as soon as it’s safe for you to do so, you should quit your job.
I know most of you aren’t going to do any of that, because most of you are brainwashed capitalists who I don’t trust or like. For those of you, well, Tumblr Crosspostr is free software, so enjoy it. But ask yourself why it is you’re probably spending anywhere from forty to sixty or maybe even eighty hours a week doing something you probably wouldn’t choose to be doing if you didn’t need the money you think you need (called your “job”) in exchange for these silly socially-constructed value-tokens called currency all because you’ve been told “money doesn’t grow on trees,” that you’re then exchanging for actually useful things that you need to survive, like food—which, by the way, does in fact grow on trees.