I’ve been using Tumblr for a week or two now and I really like it. I’m probably using it a bit differently than they intended, but I really like what it’s doing for me. It’s very easy to use and well designed, actually there are a few things I’d like to be different but I’ll cover that in a minute.
I’m using it to ‘aggregate my life’ or rather, I’m using it to pull the RSS feeds from all the different services I use and organize them chronologically into one page. Currently, it’s pulling feeds from: both my blogs and their comments, flickr, twitter, delicous, upcoming & my newsgator snippets (which i use to store posts I REALLY like). I want to start using co-comment because as I understand it, it will pull all the comments you make on OTHER sites into an RSS feed. I need to look into it deeper, but if it does that, I’m going to start using it.
The cool thing about using Tumblr like this is that it creates a page that pretty much shows all the stuff I’ve been doing on the web, chronologically. It’s literally aggregating my life. By scanning through the page, I can see all the things I’ve done lately all over the internet. I’m thinking about adding my wishlist from amazon, yahoo and thinkgeek – since I use those more like bookmarks it would log everything I’m interested in for me as well. Everything you feed into Tumblr becomes available in an aggregated RSS feed – which means there are tons of other uses for it. You can actually blog from it and email your phone pics to it – I’ll keep flickr for that though.
The thing that bugs me about Tumblr is that it limits you to 15 posts per page – I would like around 50 or so (that might be enough to fit one days worth of posts in it, but not quite). The other thing that bugs me is that even though I un-checked the setting for using partial posts, it is still only showing snippets from my blogs.
I installed a wordpress plugin that is supposed to put everything from an rss feed onto a page and configured it to put my tumblr feed on a page on my blog but it’s not working. I need to find time to troubleshoot that and get it going.
If you wanna check out my aggregated life, go here.
4 comments
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Steve Wordpressguy
April 3, 2007 at 9:03 am (UTC -7) Link to this comment
Tumblr is good fun, my only complaint with it is that it usually LOOKS so dull. My own tumblr is a bit of an experiment, and it achieves a few of its goals (primarily driving traffic to my main blog), but I think it looks terrible.
Which plugin are you struggling with? I might have tried it.
Phil801
April 4, 2007 at 7:40 am (UTC -7) Link to this comment
Steve – thanks for your input! I agree that tumblr’s site makes things look very dull, I don’t like their themes at all. For that matter, I don’t like mine! I just haven’t had time to mess with it since the upgrade.
I’m using FetchRSS to try to pull my Tumblr feed into a page. Honestly, I haven’t had time to mess with it much and it’s probably some simple thing I haven’t done. I installed the plugin, told it what RSS feed to pull and created a page with the syntax on it that the instructions indicated. That’s it. It isnt’ displaying the feed on the page and I haven’t looked into it any more. If you can tell from that what I’m doing wrong, you rock!
distantblue
April 12, 2007 at 8:25 pm (UTC -7) Link to this comment
you can create a tag in flickr totumblr and stick that rss feed into tumblr. then photos you want to hit the tumblr just tagg them thusly
Scarpe Hogan
November 28, 2008 at 3:09 am (UTC -7) Link to this comment
Real cool idea to use Tumbler as an aggregator, the idea to keep track of all your comments into a RSS feed is brilliant.