Tumblon – Best Parenting Website
Today is my sister’s birthday, and for her gift I’m moving her new baby’s website from Totsites to Tumblon, and getting her a year of the premium subscription. Both sites allow you to blog about your child, post photos, notify family members, etc., but Totsites has super cheesy templates while Tumblon is really clean. Not to mention it’s owned by a friend of mine from Zencoder, John Dahl.
The process went smoothly enough. My sister only had about 5 blog entries, and those were easy enough to cut and past over. The only issue there is I couldn’t change the date of the new post, so I had to add an “Originally posted” line.
Photos were a bit of a challenge. My sister had over 100 photos on the old site, most with captions. I needed to download each and move them over to Tumblon. Luckily I’m currently staying with my friend Justin, a programming super stud. He saw me tirelessly copying each one at time, scolded me for not doing it programatically, then helped me write a Ruby script that would parse image URLs from Totsites, download them to my computer, and name them with their captions for easy importing into Tumblon (which has an awesome multi-photo uploader). I should probably give that script to Tumblon.
I did run into an issue with the Tumblon photo uploader when I tried adding more photos than the 50 that my free account allowed for the month. It stalled in the middle of the group and then wouldn’t let me delete or edit the ones that had been uploaded. I sent a letter to support, but I upgraded to the premium account and that fixed everything anyway.
Tumblon has some awesome developmental info built into the service. I can’t quite use it myself, but I think my sister will appreciate it. Anyway, I don’t want to give out my sister’s page, but here’s mine. 
Graham Scharf said:
Apr 21, 09 at 7:36 amThanks for the feedback, Steve.
We’d love the contribution of that script for others who want to import their pictures from another service.
It probably isn’t any help now, but you can adjust the publication date on stories, photos & videos under the “advanced” options, if you choose.
If you have other suggestions or complaints, feel free to send them my way: graham at tumblon.com.
Steve said:
Apr 21, 09 at 8:02 amCool, thanks for the tip Graham, and for the quick response to my support email over the weekend. My sister’s account is all up to date now.