As many other people running their blogs on Tumblr I’ve become painfully aware of their failures to provide an acceptable service. Hours and sometimes days of downtime is unacceptable, even for a free service, when one of the most important parts of the service is availability.
So after some inquiries through Twitter I finally decided to go for Jekyll and GitHub Pages (thanks to @al3x, @masolino and everyone else who helped with answers in the right direction). As I’m already a paying subscriber to the fantastic GitHub I get the pages feature for free. Another thing I’m concerned with is peering to non-US countries, which is provided by GitHub as they sit on top of the very good Rackspace connections. As a comparison, fetching a simple HTML page from GitHub pages to Stockholm, Sweden takes about 250ms while fetching the same HTML from Tumblr can take up to 4 seconds to arrive.
I order to get all my data over from Tumblr I wrote a small script which queries the Tumblr API and converts them into Jekyll posts. The script is available at _scripts/import-from-tumblr.js and is accompanied by a script to generate a URL map, used to provide some sort of old links redirection. I’m using a simple javascript solution found in my 404.html but you might as well do something fancier with the generated url map.
So let’s see how this turns out.