So this is what Badfic!’s tag cloud looked like after importing everything from Tumblr to WordPress. I don’t know why it decided
''... ... ...''was a different tag to''... ... ...''and''... ... ...''(all the other tags imported okay).Things I learnt from this exercise: WordPress orders tags alphabetically, not by chronological order like Tumblr does. So sadly all my tag essays are now word soup.
While I don’t really do tag essays, the “…” thing has me baffled too. Because right… I’m pretty certain I’ve not used that many.
On reflection, I think it’s because WordPress judges “tag uniqueness” by the slug it generates, and WordPress slugs only contain, IIRC,
[a-z0-9-_]. So when it encounters''...'', it ends up with an empty string as the slug, meaning it falls back on using the taxonomy ID. If you’re entering the tag in via the client, it’s not such a big deal, because it displays the text but passes the internal ID. But when I did the import in the plugin, I was only passing the text strings from Tumblr. So it seems whatever processes WordPress uses to match tags against existing taxonomies involves a slug conversion/sanitisation before comparison, meaning it gets confused in situations where the slug ends up with an empty string. So it plays things “safe”, and makes a new tag every time.… That probably made no sense whatsoever. It makes sense in my head, I swear!
Sense-making! I did not know about WordPress not accepting certain punctuation in (probably because… it’s not something I’ve ever thought about) but that does make sense!
My tumblr-to-wordpress plugin has been running for 3 days? 4 days so far? Still going. I have… a lot of tumblr to get through.