Update: 12/15/2012 - I’ve just published the step-by-step guide to setting up an IFTTT recipe (WP to Tumblr).

While I was amusing myself with Tumblr’s settings for the first time, I thought of shall we say re-publishing my company’s blog posts on my Tumblr blogged. It was at that time I realized that both Tumblr and WordPress hadn’t had any native features which allowed users to share posts between the services automatically (until last months WordPress Jetpack’s publicize update).

For those of you looking for simplicity I would highly recommend using WordPress Jetpack’s publicize to automate publishing a Tumblr post about your WordPress article.  The only thing to take into consideration when setting up publicize between a WordPress and Tumblr blog is that your tags will not be transferred from one another.

For the bunch of WordPress bloggers out there that do not use Jetpack’s publicize feature finding a plugin or service automating the process of publishing new WordPress articles on Tumblr is horrendously tedious.  Admittedly I had got lucky and stumbled upon IFTTT which in recent weeks has gained some public attention with write ups in major publications such as TechCrunch and Mashable.

Without going into to too much detail about IFTTT – as I intend on doing a right up this week on the service – it’s a service that allows users to create “recipes” of triggers between services.

As an example of what a recipe would look like we’ll use our above WordPress to Tumblr problem.

If             THIS                Then               THAT

(new WP post)                             (create new Tumblr Post)

Hopefully looking at my above little example of how the IFTTT set up works which admittedly is quite simple you get the gist of the service. 

From start to finish setting up an IFTTT account, linking it to your WordPress site and Tumblr site take in all about five minutes. From there, setting up the recipe is relatively instant all it takes is a bit of planning as to how you’d like to publish your posts on Tumblr (video, quote, text). But, please keep in mind that it does not only take an excerpt rather, the whole article. As well, like using Jetpack’s publicize IFTTT recipes for Tumblr will not pull your WordPress tags however, unlike with Jetpack IFTTT allows users to create static tags for the recipe itself.

I’ll be creating a step by step guide to help readers set up their first IFTTT recipe for a WordPress to Tumblr set up. Make sure you don’t miss it, consider following my blog to receive notification of the post upon publication right in your inbox.