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How I created a Tumblr-like site on my personal blog

The personal blog that I've kept since 2003 has always had a serious personality split. It took on tech posts (especially beginner how-tos) and the music I'd been listening to, both of which could find a larger audience...if it wasn't for the fact that it was jumbled up with each other AND with the personal blog type stuff that had a, uh, extremely limited audience. I would constantly want to promote the music and tech posts, but would stop short because it conflicted with wanting to keep the personal posts for just me and my friends.

The easy answer, of course, was to split things off. My music blog (which I still kick myself for not starting years earlier) has been going for almost three years now and I write tech in various different places. But since I split things off, the personal part has barely been updated, and I missed it.  

I considered just retiring the Wordpress site and just letting Tumblr be my dumping ground, but being a sentimental guy, I couldn't just let my blog and its years of posts go. What I needed was the pros of Tumblr:
  • Easy posting from Instagram
  • The style of template that says "this is off-the-cuff content"
  • The iPhone app (instead of the Wordpress app, which is unusable)
...with the pros of Wordpress:
  • The richness of the plugins
  • The long history of my posts and comments
  • The knowledge that I can always turn it into whatever I want
What I did:
And so far...it's not working too badly. Now, right off the bat, there are a few drawbacks. One is that, because posts from Instagram don't come through the RSS with the category of "Photo", I have to give all posts coming through FeedWordPress the default category of Photo, and then manually change the ones that aren't photos (though most of them will be). There also seems to be a significant delay between the time the RSS is published to the time it ends up in Wordpress. Plus, you lose the rich community and easy functionality of Tumblr. But I'm pretty happy with it otherwise.

If anyone else has had luck creating a Tumblr-like blog, let me know in the comments what you did. I'm curious to find out ways to optimize this.

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