If you’re reading this in the Tumblr Dashboard, there’s a good chance this is irrelevant. Bear with me, though.

I’ve written before that I use a feedreader in place of the Dashboard. Tumblr offers RSS feeds for everyone’s blog, and I subscribe to these in Fever°, but, to be blunt, the RSS output from Tumblr stinks. I assume it’s an evil incentive to use the Dashboard.

Quotes, for example, are not marked up as quotes. They just have some punctuation marks and a couple of line-breaks. Post titles are a disaster; entries that don’t have explicit titles have them generated as too-long, concatenated copies of the first paragraph immediately following; so you just read the text twice.

So, I’ve written a feed script. It’s called Tumblfeed, which sounds like tumbleweed… which I suppose is a metaphor for the semantic desolation of the Tumblr RSS feeds… or something. It was an accidental rhyme. (This is why commercial software companies have gigantic marketing departments to name their products “iPad” and “Vista” and “EeePC”.)

Tumblfeed does this:

• Given a Tumblr URL, reads the last 20 posts from the API, runs them all through Markdown and then outputs them as Atom.
• Tumblfeed will attempt to infer sensible titles from posts; taking the leading heading for the post content, for example.
• It will include an HTML5 <audio> element to play back audio that you’re self-hosting (or linking to off-Tumblr.) Tumblr-hosted audio is cockblocked, so you have to play that through the Flash player on the Tumblr page itself (the feed will include a link, though.)
• Conversations are marked up with <cite> and <q> elements.
• Quotes—shockingly—are marked up with <blockquote>. Honestly, it’s like there’s some kind of out-of-control genius at work here…

In short: Tumblfeed produces legible, properly marked-up feeds for Tumblr blogs. (There’s a bit of work still to do with video posts.)

The codebase is butchered from Tumblr2Wordpress; an export script that I forked from Hao Chen and now maintain. Open source software is awesome.

To use Tumblfeed you’ll need to host it yourself. There are two files, and it throws up a simple form to generate the new feed URL. Bookmarklets and GreaseKit scripts are planned. Feeds are supposed to be reliable, so there’s no way I can offer you my server as a stable, not-going-to-go-away service. If you want to just play with it (or take your chances), contact me and I’ll share a development URL with you.