Even though I'm on Wordpress 2.7.1 (courtesy of the magical new auto-upgrade in 2.7), the Press This bookmarklet continues not to work for me. When I try to use it, I don't see the formatting buttons at the top like I should and text I select on the page I'm blogging about isn't copied into the post like it should be (at least selecting text doesn't blank the input box like it used to). This makes it fairly useless for me. Prior to 2.7.1 it wouldn't even put the URL of the page I was on in the new post so at least it's getting better. I still can't use it for everything, but I can for some stuff which is certainly good.

I’ve been using the great Tumblr service for another blog, Blind Teeth, for awhile now and I love their posting bookmarklet. It’s super easy to post anything so I wanted to figure out how to use that for posting technical stuff to this blog. I suppose I could hack around on the Press This problem to see about fixing that but I’ve spent a few hours on it already and thought I’d try this route instead. I suspect most people will have no interest in this but I wanted something for people googling to find.

First, I setup a new tumblog on Tumblr if you don’t have one for this purpose already. Blind Teeth isn’t really for technical stuff so I didn’t want to post the same things in both places. You can have multiple and it handles that really well as I’ll get to in a second. Once it’s setup, go to it and copy the URL labeled RSS on the right side of the page.

Then, install the FeedWordPress plugin in your blog. It’s very easy under 2.7, just download the zip and use the Plugins page to install it. Once it’s installed, go into the new Syndication box on the left nav menu and add the RSS URL as a new Source.

I set mine up to add new posts as Pending so I can edit them. This is a good idea as the formatting of the Tumblr post probably won’t match the formatting of your blog. Once it’s setup and going, anything you post to the new Tumblr will be added as a new Pending post in your Wordpress blog. You can then go in and edit and Publish from your admin screen. This obviously isn’t as one-click easy as just using the bookmarklet of either service as is but since my Press This doesn’t work this is a good compromise. It might even turn out to be too much friction and I abandon it but for now, it’s working pretty well and it’ll help me post here more.

As I mentioned, Tumblr has a great posting bookmarklet. The cool thing is that when you use it and you have multiple tumblogs it asks you at the bottom which one you want to post to. This means you don’t have to have multiple bookmarklets.

Tumblr is a great service and if you’re looking for somewhere easy to have a blog, try them out. I hope this was useful and if you have comments, please let me know below.