Following up to my earlier post, I’ve been looking into workarounds for the “no post to twitter” problem.  Using the excellent if-this-then-that service, it should have been possible to scrape the RSS feed for the blog and post to Twitter from that.  However,

I’d forgotten that the RSS feature has never been enabled for password protected blogs (as far as I know).  Why on earth would I want people to subscribe and get regular updates when I post to my blogs? (You need to read that in a sarcasm font :-) )

So how about writing my own code to poke the Tumblr API, identify which posts haven’t tweeted and tweet them myself?

{“meta”:{“status”:404,”msg”:”Not Found”},”response”:[]}

Aah, of course, the informative “Not Found” error message that appears when you try and query password protected blogs.  I’d forgotten that too.

Don’t get me wrong, after years using Wordpress and Blogger, I’ve settled on Tumblr as my platform of choice, it’s just so annoying that the service is 95% complete and really useful features are arbitrarily disabled.  My search continues…

Despite being heralded as the “social” blogging platform, Tumblr recently and more significantly, silently, withdrew the feature for auto-tweeting blog posts from protected blogs (and the share to FaceBook feature).  The explanation from Support is that:

It was never intended that password-protected blogs be able to post to Twitter, as the shorturls back to the Tumblr blog would create confusion for anyone who didn’t know the blog password.

Consider my use-case:  I’ve run a family blog for the past six years.  I post photos of my kids, their schools, their friends, their locations - I’ve decided that should be private, so I’ve always used a password protected blog.  My family and friends have the password.  How do I inform them of a new blog post?  Simple, they can subscribe to the Twitter account, or at least they could until about June 2012.  Are they confused when they arrive at the blog?  Nope, they just type the password in and carry on browsing.

Tumblr support have taken my feedback, but I’m not confident they’ll do anything with it or how features for the platform get decided.  It was really disappointing that a feature that had been working for me for two years got “disappeared”!  Workarounds welcomed!

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