2008-08-13
Tumblr API gripes
As I mentioned a day or two ago, Tumblr support tags (both via the API and the theme engine), and there’s also a front-end method for tag filtering. This made me wondering about incoming feeds; I have a badly-publicised second Tumblr site which pulls in images from the craneporn Flickr pool and anything tagged appropriately on delicious, and I thought it could benefit from automatically adding tags.
So, do the posts already have tags? No. The feed importer doesn’t honour them, but then, there’s not exactly a standard for tags in feeds (delicious uses multiple <category> items; Flickr uses a single <media:category> item containing multiple tags), so I can understand that. (Also, the feed importer probably predates Tumblr’s tag support.)
Right then, let’s use the API instead. Read the posts, look up the original item on Flickr or delicious, pull in the tags, and then push it back to Tumblr. Easy enough, you’d think, but no: Tumblr’s API only has two methods, “read” and “write”. No “update”, so you can’t edit an existing post, and there’s not even “delete”, so I can’t fake an update by doing a write/delete pair either. So there’s no way to backfill tags either.
This leaves me considering writing my own feed importer (especially for delicious, which is also throwing away attribution for the person who posted the link) and trying to figure out a nice way to ask for these features on Tumblr’s Get Satisfaction page, which seems to be the closest thing there is to a developer forum. (Edit: done now.) In the meantime, I really should try a write with the same date as an existing entry, just to see what happens…
