#cari.txt

[fill-this-night]

So you may or may not have heard that Automattic, Tumblr's parent company, laid off a whole bunch of people this past week. In the wake of this, I've seen some murmuring about what might become of Tumblr in the months to follow. (The answer, I think, is probably nothing--at least in the short term--but that is also not the point of this post.) Quite a few people have mentioned taking fresh backups of their blogs, which is, you know, fine. I am never going to tell someone not to back up their data whenever they think of it, so if taking a backup now will help you to sleep better at night, you should probably just go ahead and do it.

There are a number of folks here who post quite a lot of original content, and those people are understandably very concerned about what might happen in the event that Tumblr gets blipped out of existence. The blog exports that Tumblr gives you are not terribly portable--huge ZIP archives housing folder trees full of media files and barely-formatted, non-standards-compliant HTML--so the task of recreating all of that on a new site looks pretty daunting. I'm a professional computer toucher of the web-based variety, and even I don't want to do anything with those data dumps, so I 100% get it, believe me.

I've been building out a tool that will, I hope, give people seeking a portable backup a slightly better option. This tool will grab all published original posts from a user's account and export them, along with all formatting and media, in a format that can be dropped directly into a simple site generator. As of right now, I have a basic implementation working to export posts for MkDocs, using the fantastic blog plugin built into Material for MkDocs. The idea would be to build this out as a complete package, so users would be able to download a ZIP with the tool and site generator, make a couple of quick configuration changes, run the tool, and end up with a freshly-built static blog that could be hosted (for free!) on Neocities, Netlify, or wherever else.

I am probably gonna finish building this regardless, because it's fun and I want to, but my question is this: would you use a Tumblr backup/export bundle like this, provided that it existed and that the documentation for it was solid? What would you personally like to see in a Tumblr post export tool? Are there any features that would make it more useful to you? Please reblog, and feel free to leave your thoughts in the post or tags!

Thanks so much! ✨

[robotgirldivinity]

Calling chatGPT an AI is an insult to me specifically.

[blodeuweddschild]

Ok but why did they decide to use an actual dead girls death mask for a resusci Anne doll? Would it have been so hard to just make up a face instead of using this poor unidentified dead girls face

[fill-this-night]

I made a nicer Tumblr export/backup tool

Edit (10 June 2026):

Hi, lovely person who is reading and/or reblogging this post! If you're looking for a way to back up or export your Tumblr posts, you might be interested in TumblBee, my new cross-platform Tumblr export app!

TumblBee by Cari

A Tumblr backup and export tool 🐝

I share updates at @tumblbee-app, if you'd like to keep up with the latest.

I've mostly stopped development on TumblMark to focus on TumblBee, which has better handling of exports, better UX, and many more features. That said, if you'd like to try the prototype, or if you're interested in forking the code for your own project, you can still find TumblMark on Codeberg.

Original post below!

In the aftermath of Automattic's latest round of layoffs, I learned that Tumblr's built-in exports are somewhat lacking for those of us wanting a truly portable backup solution. So, armed with vague notions of what a better option might look like, I decided to try and build it myself!

First off, I want to acknowledge all of the many lovely folks who helped this little project along--thanks so much to everyone who liked and/or reblogged my posts, shared feature suggestions, offered encouraging words, etc. etc. It's more fun working on a project like this when you think that it'll get used! I hope that what I made will be useful to at least a few of you. 💕

With that, I'm happy to announce that TumblMark is available for download!

GitHub - lilacpixel/tumblmark: Quickly export your original Tumblr posts to a static site with MkDocs and Material for MkDocs.

Quickly export your original Tumblr posts to a static site with MkDocs and Material for MkDocs. - lilacpixel/tumblmark

The tool is built to run on any computer that runs modern Python, so you should have no issues using it on whatever you have handy. I tried my best to make the README clear and easy to understand, even for folks who've never used command-line software before, but you know how it goes. If there's anything that trips you up as you're working through the steps, let me know here or in a GitHub issue, and I'll make sure it gets fixed. (And, of course, please don't hesitate to report any issues that you might encounter with the tool itself!)

A couple of notes that I thought were worth mentioning:

It's also mentioned in the README, but there's a bug with the lightbox plugin that prevents images from zooming when clicked on the main blog listing and archive pages. I've reported the issue to the plugin's developer, and I'm evaluating other options, but for now, you'll have to click through to the single post view to zoom in on images. 😔

As it goes with these things, I had to make some tough choices regarding what features would make it to the first release. Markdown is easier to work with than HTML, and many people already have some familiarity with it from Discord, Slack, etc. So I tried to favor Markdown-based solutions as much as possible. This meant tabling some features that I'd really hoped to include, like responsive images with srcset. If I have the time and I think there's some interest, I might consider a future version that's built on Eleventy (or another static site generator) with a custom theme. This could add a lot of functionality, but it would also be a much bigger undertaking on my part, so let me know if this is something that you might like to see!

Lastly, if you find this tool useful, you can support me and my creative works with a tip! (Thank you!!)

❤️ https://ko-fi.com/lilacpixel ❤️

Thanks so much for reading! I hope you'll consider sharing with your followers, and please let me know what you think if you decide to try it out!! 💕

[fill-this-night]

Tumblr post exporter - project updates

I've gotten a little interest in the Tumblr exporter that I've been building, so I thought I'd go ahead and share a quick update on the progress I've made, as well as some details on what's left to finish. Thanks so much to everyone who's reblogged and/or shared feedback and suggestions! ❤️

So… what is it?

To its credit, Tumblr does offer a functional backup tool, and it does basically what it says on the tin. However, it's as barebones as they come--the backup process takes hours to run and produces huge, multi-gigabyte archives, with all of your posts rendered in unstyled, non-standards-compliant HTML.

This might be fine if you just want a personal backup, but it's not terribly useful if you're hoping to export your content in a format that can be deployed elsewhere. To address this shortcoming, I've been developing a tool to pair with one of my favorite static site generators, MkDocs. Just run the tool with your API credentials, and it'll grab your posts and content, convert them into Markdown, and create a fresh static site build, ready to upload to your web host of choice! yay, the future 💃

Read on for more updates!

How it's going

The following are already tested and working with Tumblr post exports:

Text posts, including all formatting (bold, italic, strikethrough, small text, different colors) and all of the block options (bigger, biggest, quotes, chats, cursive, indented, and lists)

YouTube embeds

Question/answer posts

Tags are preserved for all post types

Self-reblogs! Thanks to @keepinventory for flagging this one for me. This feature will remain optional, for those who'd like to keep their archive free of nested reblogs, but I'll provide an easy toggle to enable it for those who need it.

I still need to tackle the following things before I'll feel comfortable pushing out an alpha release:

Preserving "keep reading" links in posts that have a cut. (So many jokes depend on these!!)

Quote, link, and chat post types haven't yet been tested, but I suspect they will use the same formatting as the equivalent text post blocks. Hopefully, they'll work out of the box.

Audio and video posts need to be tested for both uploaded and linked media (excluding YouTube, which is already working)

The image grid is a pretty essential part of the Tumblr experience, which doesn't really have a straightforward Markdown equivalent. Even though HTML is valid in Markdown (and is used for things like video embeds, for which there are no alternatives), I'd like to keep as much of the output in Markdown as possible, so that users can more easily edit posts or make new ones with an editor like Obsidian. I have some ideas for how to approach this, but we'll just have to see what ends up working.

Right now, images in posts are displaying properly, but they're referencing the Tumblr copies. Which, obviously, is not what we want. I need to write a method that will grab images from the server, save them to the drive, and update the references in the Markdown posts. Ditto for uploaded audio and video clips. I suspect that this will be The Hard Part, but I would love to be pleasantly surprised.

And on the very basic end: support for user inputs (as opposed to running off of my hard-coded credentials 💀), more user feedback, better error handling. And some documentation!

also, I guess it needs a name. I keep changing it and I'll probably change it again. why am I like this

Other notes

I'm using the Material for MkDocs theme as the foundation for the project, which makes it super easy to turn a plaintext config file and a folder of Markdown files into a full-fledged website. The configuration I provide will enable a lot of nice features out of the box, including light/dark mode support, a tag page, and functional search (yes!! really!!). You'll be able to edit the config to customize things to your liking, so if you want to, say, change the colors, swap out the logo, and create a bunch of custom pages to add to the navigation, you can do that. It's a super cool set of features built on top of a really great static site generator, and I'm excited for the chance to use it in something!

If things continue to move forward at a good clip, I'd love to have an alpha out for folks to test by the end of the month. The tool is built in Python, and I'll make sure to document the Python setup process for those of you who haven't used it before. But if you've already got it installed, you'll be ahead of the game when it drops 🐍

---

And with that, the IDE beckons (or I guess I should take a break and make some dinner, mumblemumble). As always, I'd love to hear your feedback and suggestions--feel free to share this, leave a reply, put your comments in the tags, whatever. Maybe reblog and add pictures of your cat, to motivate me. It will almost definitely help!! thank you in advance ❤️🐱❤️

[fill-this-night]

me when I post the first drawing I've posted anywhere in months and everyone is very nice to me

[fill-this-night]

🐝 Introducing TumblBee: a friendly cross-platform Tumblr export tool

After many weeks of coding, designing, testing, and re-testing, the first release of my new Tumblr export app is finally available for download!

✨ https://lilacpixel.itch.io/tumblbee ✨

TumblBee is a pay-what-you-want cross-platform desktop app for backing up or exporting your original Tumblr posts. It supports both main and side blogs and exports to your choice of Markdown or HTML formats, with plenty of configurable options to choose from. Export to Markdown for compatibility with a variety of apps and site generators, or export straight to HTML with beautiful responsive styling, courtesy of Pico CSS.

If you share art or writing on your Tumblr account, or if you just want to have a backup of your post history, TumblBee makes it easy to save all of your original posts and pages. Keep them as a local copy for personal browsing, or upload them wherever you like.

You'll find more info on TumblBee, along with FAQs, setup guides, usage instructions, and more, on the documentation site.

Thank you to everyone who liked or shared my posts during development. I appreciate you all so much. ❤️ I hope you'll give the finished app a try--and please let me know if you do!

[fill-this-night]

Just two days after the first release of my Tumblr backup/export tool, we are already at version 0.2! This version is a significant refactor (translation: faster, better-er) and adds support for posts with polls, so make sure to grab the latest release if you're planning on trying it!

GitHub - lilacpixel/tumblmark: Quickly export your original Tumblr posts to a static site with MkDocs and Material for MkDocs.

Quickly export your original Tumblr posts to a static site with MkDocs and Material for MkDocs. - lilacpixel/tumblmark

Is there a way to notify the people who interacted with my previous posts while this thing was in development, other than to go through my activity feed and make a new post tagging all of them? Mastodon sends a notification when a post that you liked or boosted gets updated, which is nice. I don't think we have anything like that here? I'd like to be sure that people who were waiting patiently know that a release is available, but a mass mention feels obnoxious. I guess it's just in the hands of fate! Fifteen-plus years and I am no closer to figuring out how people get notes on here.