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Aggregate your online activity using Tumblr [Tutorial]

Friendfeed is a great site. It collects all your “social networks” activity and creates a linear feed where your friends can leave comments. This is great but what if you wanted total control of your feed as well as how your site looks. You want your own identity, control over the content and ability to post your own content whenever you like. Tumblr is the answer. 

Different to other blogging platforms like WordPress and Typepad, Tumblr simplifies this activity of blogging by allowing you to post items by content – text, video, audio, quote, photo, chat or a link. Whilst this may seem like a limitation, it’s in fact an advantage for many who do not need advance features that other blogging services. It’s easy to sign up, all your need is your email and password and you are ready to go. Should you want to customize your blog there are a lot of custom themes available and some are truly amazing (linky) and you can also use your own domain. 

  

To aggregate your activities you will need to use RSS import function in Tumblr. RSS is a method for many sites to outputting latest content in the form that many news readers can read. You basically subscribe to a feed (RSS) and as the news is posted it comes right into reader. If you have an account on Flickr, you will notice on the page where your stream is, at the bottom, a link to RSS feed.

You can choose “latest” or “all”. Ctrl Click on the latest and copy that FEED Address. You can now go into tumblr setting, go to feeds, import a new feeds as “photos” or “flickr” and paste the link you copying into the feed field (see below). Save this feed and you are ready to go. From now, whenever you post a picture to Flickr it will show in your Tumblr. If you want to be more selective which pictures you would like to show in your Tumblr, all you have to do is create an Album on flickr called say “Some Name” and subscribe to the feed of that album rather than of your main picture stream. 

This principle works well for many other sites. If we take Twitter for example, it also offers RSS feed of your updates. All you have to do, again, is copy that feed and import a new RSS feed as “Text without Titles” and pasting the feed address.
 

A more advanced example of this aggregation is the TN2020 Summit blog.  The Site aggregates all kinds of information relevant to the summit. It is all set up using tools like Tumblr, Yahoo! Pipes, Feedburner, Flickr, Twitter, .. and so on. For the blog search for example it uses Google and Technorati as sources, a custom Yahoo pipe to remove duplicates and finally Tumblr to display the result.

Here is also an example how Alexander Kohlhofer reorganised his personal site using Tumblr.

 

If you want to blog on the go, there are a few iPhone apps available for Tumblr. They are  Tumbl, TheTumbler and Tumblrette. There is also a plugin (application) for facebook. 

Hope you enjoyed this tutorial. If you have any questions, just post in the comments.

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