Silently Push Posts from Tumblr to WordPress

Posted on July 13, 2012 by ann

Over at anndbang, we build content-heavy websites.  When clients come to us, they rarely have enough content to fill a proper blog, much less a targeted social media strategy. As designers know, you can’t really design anything without knowing what it is you’re actually designing. This key piece is often what clients are missing when they come to us.

We’ve developed a process to help clients develop content while we develop the site. We use tumblr to build content AND community, which helps us understand our clients target market and places clients in multiple Google search rankings.  It’s really quite cool.

The caveat is, while tumblr is a great platform with a simple interface (great for clients who can barely send attachments with their emails – we love y’all!), clients don’t own it. Ownership and its many gray areas is central to anndbang’s values, so while doing content development, we would publish blogs on a self-hosted WordPress platform and use a plugin to push posts to tumblr.

But what about the other way around? Tumblr is waaaaaaay easier to use than WordPress and we like that for clients who are not tech savvy. The process of pushing posts from tumblr to WordPress involved a series of exports and scripts that was way too inefficient for our little agency that could (and does!).

Enter If This Then That, stage left. I just figured this out this morning, so it might be a bit glitchy. IFTTTis a service that creates recipes out of major web company APIs and essentially lets them talk to each other. GENIUS. Okay. So! The recipe:

If I post anything on Tumblr, send an email from Gmail to my email that sends posts to WordPress.

Super simple, right? Well… almost. This assumes you have a self-hosted WordPress installation (although IFTTT does connect to the WordPress.com, it doesn’t serve our purpose here). You also have to set up your WordPress installation to listen for incoming emails.

But does it work? I’m glad you asked! This post was published on simplyann.tumblr.com and pushed to simplyann.net. Fancy, right?

via Tumblr http://simplyann.tumblr.com/post/27139107593

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