Finally Cleaned My Tumblr Account
Whoah, now that was a mission!
I’ve had this Tumblr account for over a year now but haven’t bothered trying to update it as I got bored and moved on to using my Soup account as a primary website. I hardly ever post to my actual website any more either. The reason why I’m picking up this Tumblr account again after all this time is that I’m experimenting with setting up a proper lifestream, and considering canning my original site entirely.
This Tumblr blog will be imported into my Soup account alongside all my other social network activity. I’m not going to be importing any feeds to Tumblr as I want to keep this stream purely for blog or editorial content - if I ever get round to writing any.
When I originally set up this Tumblr blog I imported a load of feeds into it from my flickr, last.fm, and ffffound accounts. Doing so Imported over a thousand posts and I wanted to get rid of them so I could start again with the same domain, login and password. Tumblr has no method of doing that at all. I’d have to click delete then ok thousands of times to clear every post.
I emailed support and recieved a very polite email back telling me the only way to do what I was trying to do was to delete my account and start again! After a bit of googling I found a post on a site called Internet Duct Tape called How to delete your Tumblr tumblelog with TumblrCleanr and tried dicking about with the various methods (installing an app on Windows in a VM, and then faffing about with Ruby gems and Terminal) before getting too annoyed and giving up. I eventually found another article entitled on a website called Maison des lunes that showed a way to do it with Firefox, Selenium IDE and the flow control extension. You can basically write a short script to automate your browser going to your dashboard page, clicking delete on the top post, confirming it wants to delete the post and then looping back on itself. It took hours to do it but I finally have a clean Tumblr. I have no idea why the Tumblr devs didn’t think to include a mass delete or purge function, especially when importing feeds can create so many posts.
Next step, configuring my Posterous account. Dunno what I’m going to do with it but it should be fun.
