Tumblr 'likes' via RSS
February 4, 2011 6:22 AM Subscribe
I want my tumblr 'likes' to be readable via RSS. Tumblr does allow you to export your data (including 'likes') by xml or json via their API. Unfortunately I have no clue how to get started and would appreciate any help. Thanks.
Man, I'm dumb, that's not really an easy thing to do. I just signed up for a throwaway account on tumblr so I can figure this out.
posted by wayland at 7:25 AM on February 4, 2011
posted by wayland at 7:25 AM on February 4, 2011
There's a Y!Pipe for this, though I don't have a tumblr with publicly available likes, so I lack something to test: yahoo pipe.
posted by artlung at 9:51 AM on February 4, 2011
posted by artlung at 9:51 AM on February 4, 2011
Looks like that Yahoo Pipe only works for particular photo posts, as it's looking for particular <div id="hires_photos"> HTML. Some other Yahoo Pipe that is more general might work better, though something that uses the API should be more resilient to changes on Tumblr's end (as they'll be more careful to keep the API compatible than the HTML on the liked-by pages).
If you want to use the API, you'd need something like a PHP script (or wayland's offered Python script) that can authenticate to the API, get the likes, and reformat them as a feed. I don't know your level of expertise with that sort of thing, but even for people who know how to use APIs like that, it can be a pain to keep something like that running. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be anything that does that in their app gallery already, so someone's not already doing that for you. If you do end up with a script that does it, you'd (a) need a place to run it from and (b) have to put your Tumblr password into it, so it can authenticate to the API as you.
If someone planned on hosting such a service for other people instead of providing a script, one thing I learned using the Tumblr API is they support OAuth but don't yet point that out from the general API docs. OAuth is harder to implement in a one-off script, but would let the service deal with OAuth tokens (which are like cancelable, secondary passwords) instead of having to have your real Tumblr password.
posted by markpasc at 5:47 PM on February 5, 2011
If you want to use the API, you'd need something like a PHP script (or wayland's offered Python script) that can authenticate to the API, get the likes, and reformat them as a feed. I don't know your level of expertise with that sort of thing, but even for people who know how to use APIs like that, it can be a pain to keep something like that running. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be anything that does that in their app gallery already, so someone's not already doing that for you. If you do end up with a script that does it, you'd (a) need a place to run it from and (b) have to put your Tumblr password into it, so it can authenticate to the API as you.
If someone planned on hosting such a service for other people instead of providing a script, one thing I learned using the Tumblr API is they support OAuth but don't yet point that out from the general API docs. OAuth is harder to implement in a one-off script, but would let the service deal with OAuth tokens (which are like cancelable, secondary passwords) instead of having to have your real Tumblr password.
posted by markpasc at 5:47 PM on February 5, 2011
This thread is closed to new comments.
Also, do you plan to have that rss feed read by an application or an online newsreader?
posted by wayland at 6:55 AM on February 4, 2011