seanmonstar

Cleaning Your Tumblr

I originally setup my Tumblr unsure of what to use it for, so I just added a bunch of feeds to it, like my Twitter, my blog feed, my delicious links, and my github activity. But when I decided to actually use my Tumblr as a real blog, I decided I didn’t want all that junk in here.

For whatever reason, Tumblr doesn’t provide any sort of simple way to clean out a lot (1000+) of posts. The only way to delete posts it to scroll to the post in the dashboard, click the “delete” button, and wait for the POST to be submitted and the page reloaded, which forgets your current scroll position. I wasn’t going to do that 1000 times.

Thankfully, there’s a decent API that lets you easily receive all your posts. The posts have a field set if they had been imported through a feed. And with the dashboard using Prototype, it was a matter of putting together 2 functions to read and delete posts, and then some minor babysitting to make sure to pause when Tumblr would throttle me.

var keepGoing = true,
    tumblr = '',
    email = '',
    password = '',
    posts = 0;
function findFeedItems(json) {
    json.posts.each(function(p) {
        if(p['feed-item']) {
            apiDelete(p['id'])
        }
    });

    if (keepGoing) {
        apiRead.delay(20);
    }
}

function apiRead() {
    console.log('reading...');
    var nonce = new Date();
    var s = document.createElement('script');
    s.src = "http://"+tumblr+".tumblr.com/api/read/json?num=50&callback=findFeedItems&start=" + posts + "&nonce=" + (+nonce);

    document.body.appendChild(s);
}

function apiDelete(id) {
    console.log('deleting: %s', id);
    new Ajax.Request('/api/delete', {
        method: 'post',
        parameters: 'email='+email+'&password='+password+'&post-id=' + id,
        onSuccess: function() {
            console.log("Successful deletion: %s", id);
        },
        onFailure: function(transport) {
            console.log('delete failed: ', transport.status);
        }
    });
}

While on the dashboard, copy and paste this into your console, with the proper variables filled in, of course.

Just called apiRead() to get it started. When you see a delete failure, you can pause your purge by setting keepGoing to false. Wait a few seconds, set it back to true, and call apiRead() again.

Once you’re no longer seeing successes or failures, but you know theres more posts, you can set the posts variable to 50, or 100, or higher. That will start the search farther down your posts.

Again, this script will delete everything imported from a feed. If you want to just delete everything, pull out the if(p['feed-item']) condition, and just pass all the posts to apiDelete.