Posterous recently announced its shutting down. And a whole lot of folks who had switched to the very popular blogging platform suddenly need to move to a new service yet again.
This is a Tumblr only problem. I personally backed up the Posterous blogs and imported them into WordPress in a few easy steps outlined here.
– Request a backup in Posterous Spaces
– Wait for the completion of the above (you get an email)
– Save the zip file
– Unzip it
– After having created a WordPress account, on the dashboard, go to Tools->Import and use the wordpress_export_1.xml file from the unzipped directory to start the import.
– Wait
But, on Tumblr, no such luck. You just cannot do an import from other services. (Read Quote of Sachin Agarwal’s answer to How can I import an existing blog into Tumblr? on Quora)
JustMigrate is a service created for solving exactly this!
So I did a quick test for one of my blogs.
Its easy enough to get started with. You enter your existing posterous blog, enter the email id that you setup your Tumblr account with, and go!
I had started the migration for 100 posts a few hours ago. But as you can see above, there’s a queue and I’m still waiting! I had moved from Posterous to WordPress earlier – free, easy and WordPress did send a done mail much quicker.
To be fair, this is small team and a quick hack, not a “startup” yet (the team itself is working on http://3crumbs.com/). It was created as a reaction to a specific, but high visibility pain point, and many do start that way. This might be the start of a longer journey of blogging tools, especially cross platform ones, but for now, its very useful hack if they can figure out the scale to make the most of this short term opportunity.
