Read Tumblr offline in chronological order?

April 24, 2016 3:31 PM

I'd like to read a 7-year old Tumblr in chronological order. It's not mine so I don't have access to the dashboard to download an xml. Is there any way scrape the archives of a tumbler into a more readable format? Ideally I'd a single text or PDF file, but I'm open to other options.

Google searching provides the following:

-Options for saving a Tumblr's videos and photos. I want primarily text. If photos and videos come with it, that's fine.
-A few websites which claim to perform this service but time out (Frostbox, Benapps.
-Apps for saving articles one-by-one to read later. I'd like to scrape a whole Tumblr at once.

I'd be happy to read it in HTML or get an app that can scrape it for me. I'm willing to throw some money at this if someone knows of a paid app that would definitely work for this purpose.

AskMe has a similar question from 2008 but things have changed a bit since then.

Any ideas?

posted by paddingtonb to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

http://boutofcontext.com/tumblr_backup.php

Try that?
posted by Brockles at 3:38 PM on April 24, 2016 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Thanks for the suggestion Brockles! I enter the name of the tumblr and press enter, and the page refreshes, deleting the handle. I tried with a few different handles, browsers and both mac and PC -- same result every time. Does it work successfully for you?
posted by paddingtonb at 7:57 PM on April 24, 2016

WordPress can import a Tumblr. I don't remember if one must own the Tumblr, that is, be able to log in.
posted by Homer42 at 9:09 PM on April 24, 2016

Huh, that's weird. It worked for me before, and now it's doing that for me, too.
posted by Brockles at 9:31 PM on April 24, 2016

Response by poster: I tried Wordpress too -- you need to be the Tumblr owner.
posted by paddingtonb at 7:09 AM on April 25, 2016

Best answer: you could use their V1 api by appending /api/read?start=0&num=50

that will return the most recent 50. if there are more you can then do

/api/read?start=51&num=50
/api/read?start=100&num=50

Note: The max you can get at once is 50.

Here is an example w/ the staff blog:

https://staff.tumblr.com/api/read?start=0&num=50
https://staff.tumblr.com/api/read?start=50&num=50
https://staff.tumblr.com/api/read?start=100&num=50
https://staff.tumblr.com/api/read?start=150&num=50

etc

Pretty rough and you'd have to copy paste them yourself, and then it would still be XML format
posted by czytm at 7:47 AM on April 25, 2016

Best answer: I'd be happy to read it in HTML

So what about creating a brand new tumblr account and following just that one blog?

Turn off endless scrolling and then jump to https://www.tumblr.com/dashboard/9999 which should get you to the end of your dashboard which will be the start of the blog.
posted by Lanark at 12:42 PM on April 25, 2016 [1 favorite]