All-Encompassing Trip

Hello. My name is Guillermo Esteves. I design & build websites. I live in Washington, DC and work at Vox Media as a front-end developer for The Verge. I also run D.C. Past, a blog of historic photographs of Washington, DC.

How to import the Tumblr blogs you follow into Google Reader

Update: Tumblr’s Jacob Bijani made an experimental, unsupported way of getting an OPML file you can import into Google Reader or your favorite feed reader, by visiting tumblr.com/following.opml. In case it stops working, you can still use my original instructions below.

What I did, basically, was use Tumblr’s template engine to generate an OPML file that can be imported into Google Reader or any other RSS reader. What you have to do is:

  1. Go to the Customize screen. Use Tumblr’s new “Pages” feature to create a new page with a custom layout. (Thanks to TJ for the idea!)
  2. Use this as the code for the new page: 
    <html>
<body>
<textarea rows=24 cols=80>
&lt;?xml version=&quot;1.0&quot; encoding=&quot;UTF-8&quot;?&gt;
&lt;opml version=&quot;1.0&quot;&gt;
&lt;head&gt;
&lt;title&gt;Blogs you follow on Tumblr&lt;/title&gt;
&lt;/head&gt;
&lt;body&gt;
{block:Following}
&lt;outline title=&quot;Tumblr&quot; text=&quot;Tumblr&quot;&gt;
{block:Followed}
&lt;outline text=&quot;{FollowedName}&quot;
title=&quot;{FollowedName}&quot; type=&quot;rss&quot;
xmlUrl=&quot;{FollowedURL}rss&quot; htmlUrl=&quot;{FollowedURL}&quot;/&gt;
{/block:Followed}
&lt;/outline&gt;
{/block:Following}
&lt;/body&gt;
&lt;/opml&gt;
</textarea>
</body>
</html>
  3. Save your changes, then go to the page you just created. You’ll see a text box with a bunch of XML crap in it. Select all of it, copy it to Notepad, TextEdit, or your favorite plain text editor, and save it as tumblr.xml or whatever. This is your OPML file.
  4. Go back to the Customize screen, and delete the page, if you want, or leave it there in case you need it in the future.
  5. Go to Google Reader and select Settings > Reader Settings in the top right corner. Go to the Import/Export tab, and upload the OPML file you saved before.
  6. All your Tumblr blogs are in a Tumblr folder in Google Reader, so you can now go to the Subscriptions tab in Settings, type “tumblr” in the “filter by…” textbox, and delete any blogs you don’t want to follow in Google Reader.

That’s it. Like I said, it’s not the best way to read Tumblr, and you can’t heart or reblog posts, but if you have a few blogs you definitely don’t want to miss, this is a good way to get them into Google Reader.