My Dive into Full-Text Search for Tumblr
So, there I was, staring at years of my old Tumblr blogs. You know how it is, a digital attic full of stuff I barely remembered posting. Tumblr’s built-in search? Forget about it. Utterly useless for finding anything specific unless you remember the exact weird tag you used back in 2012. I figured, “There’s gotta be a better way. I need some real full-text search on this mess.” That’s what sent me down the rabbit hole of what I’ll call the “fts tumblr” project.
First thing I did was try to get my data. Seemed simple, right? Wrong. Tumblr’s export options were, let’s say, not exactly developer-friendly for what I wanted. I poked around their API, hit rate limits, and generally felt like I was trying to squeeze water from a rock. Some folks online mentioned tools, but most were either outdated or wanted you to jump through hoops. It was a real pain just to get a decent dump of my own content.
Wrangling the Data and Finding a Search Thingy
Okay, so after a lot of fiddling, I managed to scrape together a collection of my posts. It was a mess – HTML snippets, weird formatting, image links, the whole shebang. Now, how to make this searchable? I started looking into full-text search engines. I’m not talking about setting up some massive enterprise-level thing, just something I could run locally or on a small server for my personal archive.
- I looked at tools like Meilisearch, Typesense, even considered just dumping it into SQLite with FTS5.
- Each had its own learning curve, its own way of needing the data structured.
- And remember, my data was a chaotic export from Tumblr. Cleaning that up to feed into any of these systems? That was another nightmare. Parsing out actual text content from all the theme cruft and embedded stuff was tedious.
I spent a good few evenings just writing little scripts to try and sanitize the posts. It felt like I was becoming an expert in Tumblr’s weird historical HTML quirks. Every time I thought I had it, another edge case would pop up. A different kind of embed, a weird character encoding issue, posts that were just images with no text… you name it.
Did It Work? Well… Sort Of.
Eventually, I got a basic setup working with a lightweight FTS engine. I could type in keywords and, yeah, it would find posts. Was it good? Eh. It was functional. But it wasn’t the slick, seamless experience I’d initially envisioned. The search results were okay, but sometimes a bit noisy because of all the boilerplate text I couldn’t perfectly strip out. And keeping it updated if I ever decided to post on those old Tumblrs again? That would mean re-doing a lot of the export and import hassle.
Honestly, the whole “fts tumblr” adventure taught me a couple of things. First, getting your data out of platforms in a truly useful format is often way harder than it should be. They love it when you put stuff in, not so much when you want to take it out and use it your own way. Second, while full-text search is powerful, it’s not magic. The quality of your search depends massively on the quality and cleanliness of the data you feed it. Garbage in, garbage out, as they say, or in this case, messy Tumblr posts in, somewhat messy search results out.
In the end, I used it a few times to find specific old posts I was looking for. But the effort-to-reward ratio? Pretty skewed. It makes you realize how locked-in your content can become on these platforms. If I were starting fresh, I’d probably think twice about how I archive my stuff, maybe opt for something more open from the get-go. But hey, it was an experience, and I did get to flex some scripting muscles, so there’s that. Just don’t expect Tumblr to make it easy for you if you wanna do anything clever with your own data.
