As most of you know, I made the switch from WordPress to Tumblr and then back to WordPress last year. The second migration back to WordPress being a relatively painful & manual-date-entry experience. If I had waited a couple of months, that would've been so much easier...

WooThemes launched our brand new Tumblr2WP tool last week, which basically exports any Tumblr account to WordPress and makes it immediately compatible with WooThemes' tumblog themes, as well as Express.app. Sweet. Heck, we even made it onto Mashable.

With more than 250 Tumblr accounts already exported since launch on Friday, I'd think that there's quite a few people that wants to marry the flexibility of WP with the awesome publishing experience that Tumblr has popularized in the last year or so. And this is exactly what we've been trying to create and enable at WooThemes: we wanted to replicate as much of the great functionality that has made Tumblr popular on our preferred platform (WordPress) and then give you the opportunity to decide which of these platforms you wanted to use.

If you haven't yet and have a Tumblr blog at present, have a look at the new tool and consider a switch...

I just watched this video and I quite enjoyed some of the insight that went into the creation of Tumblr and kudo's to David for not doing the cliche thing which is to knock other tools; instead he believes in a "horses for courses" mentality whereby Tumblr is used for certain reasons, whilst other people still prefer WP (or others) for other reasons.

Having myself been through various ups & downs in terms of blogging and content-creation over the last 4 years, I can attest to everything David said in the little interview. Heck, this even saw me move to Tumblr, which was quite a significant thing considering I'm co-founder of one of the biggest WordPress companies on the web.

Since then I have however been able to move back to WordPress (powered by Woo of course) and I now have 90% of the functionality I had with Tumblr, plus the added benefit of not battling Tumbeasts and owning my own data.

Hopefully within the next day or two, WooThemes will be able to release a little something that too will give you Tumblr-like functionality on your own, hosted WordPress-powered platform.

The Tumblr experiment is over & I'm officially back on WordPress. Heck, I couldn't be the co-founder of one of the largest WordPress theming companies online & not take advantage of all the cool stuff we've been building lately...

This is my new setup:

• WordPress (exported my data via this tool, which WooThemes will probably look to improve soon);
• An unmodified version of the magnificent Canvas (soon to be replaced with a custom-designed child theme);
• Support for the WooTumblog plugin, which is integrated with Canvas; and
• Mobile publishing via our new iPhone application, Express.

Why did I do this now? Well, our WordPress work in the last couple of months evolved and progressed to such an extent that most of the benefits of initially experimenting with Tumblr finally evaporated (in the sense that I could get the same features on WordPress and own my own data). So moving back to WordPress and thoroughly giving our own work a kick of the tires, seemed like a logical and much more flexible choice.

You can thus take this move as a signal of my and our intent in the microblogging space and you should expect WooThemes to cause a few ripples in this regard in the next couple of months.

Watch this space.

[box type="note"]There's a lot still to happen here and this is just the very first phase of the migration back to WordPress. So bear with me whilst I customize & improve everything again...[/box]

So yesterday I had the opportunity of meeting up with the Tumblr crew and beyond being an awesome bunch of people, I also got some insight into the company / platform / community that they are busy building.

When I moved over to Tumblr in March, I had a few “concerns” about the changes I would need to accept in comparison to what I got used to over the years with WordPress. Today though, I can honestly say that my decision to move has been justified over and over again and after the insight that the crew shared yesterday, I think my decision will continue to reap benefits.

Here’s why I love Tumblr at the moment:

• It’s not a platform and it’s not a CMS; instead it’s a community where I’m enabled to share cool stuff with cool people.
• The ideas they are implementing with regards to monetization is extremely unique and I’m loving the opportunity to watch this journey & business model unfold from the sidelines.
• There’s a buzz about this place and as a result I’ve made quite a few new friends.

This is the latest Tumblr theme from the WooThemes guys. Check it out!

And btw… More themes here.