I like Tumblr, it’s great for letting people know about the odd bits and pieces you pick up on your Interweb travels. The problem is I already maintain a full deck of WordPress blogs and I don’t want my audiences to have to keep track of multiple feeds or sub-blogs, I want it all in one place.

Now there’s a few different ways of doing this:

1) Use Tumblr’s built-in javascript tool to embed your Tumblog into your WordPress theme (like the right-hand sidebar on WhatKatyDid). This is the easiest way, all you have to do is add the following code to your theme, wherever you want the posts to display:

” <script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://yourusername.tumblr.com/js”></script>”

You can then style the output to match your site with CSS. The downside, for me, with this solution is the lack of cohesion within the site. You’ve basically got two blogs vying for your reader’s attention, with no common timeline.

2) Use reBlog to post your Tumblr RSS feed into your WP database. This is a more technical solution, you’re going to need to be comfortable messing with SQL databases and installing software on your webserver, so if you’re not comfortable with doing that, or don’t have sufficient access privileges, this isn’t for you.

For my purposes reBlog is simply unnecessary, as I’m only really concerned with link posts and it’s not worth the server overhead. If you use more of Tumblr’s functionality, though, this might be a nice solution for you.

3) This is my current preferred option – hack WordPress to add Tumblr-like functionality with custom fields. A good “how-to” is available at istudioweb (check out my additional advice in the comments), so I won’t go into the ins and outs here. To see an example of the end product have a look at WhatKatyDid.

Have you got a better way of doing it, or have feedback on these methods? You know where the comments are.