Want to Archive your tweets to your blog?
I did, and I ended up in quite a digital journey…
Prelude:
If you are a bit like me, you have multiple important (and not so important) digital places in which you keep things at. Heck! you probably have multiple blogs, Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, and so on accounts.
Background:
One day a while back, after reading an article about why each of us have so many digital places to post things to, I decided it would be nice to do a bit of consolidation. What better way to start, I thought, than to get my tweets in to my blog on a consistent bases… Besides, it serves as a dual purpose: to backup my tweet to my own blog! Makes sense right?
What a journey I ended up in!
As it turns out, there is no easy way – at least that I was able to find at the time – of grabbing one’s tweets and post them to my blog in a simple table (date and tweet w/ hyperlink) format. Everything I found was about XML, text files, Twitter API, utilities, and a bunch of other things that really did not hit the mark. I was actually quite surprised about this…)
After researching across the web and looking at a number of possible routes, the first time I did this was a lot of manual work:
- Found an excellent Java-based utility (TwitterBackup 3.1.8 by Johann Burkard) which allowed me (after installation of Java) to point at my Twitter stream, give it an output file name, and after a couple of minutes, it produced an nicely formatted XML file on my computer…
- Imported imported the XML file into an Excel spreadsheet, formatted a bit the data, removed some of the stuff I did not want, sorted the data by date and *finally*I had a table list (cells) that I can work with
- oh! I can’t forget the time I spent, creating a formula to convert the link tweet’s text into a link… that was fun.. Took me back to my Excel mastering days 😉
- Wanted to create an blog entry with the list of all the tweets I had for a particular period. In my case I wanted my monthly update… So I end up cut-and-paste into each blog entry, for each period..
- I noticed, a couple of scenario: sometimes I had too many tweets for the month, so I end-up splitting them into multiple blogs; and other times I had too little, so I end-up combining a few.
in other words: set time increments would not work all of the time…
- I noticed, a couple of scenario: sometimes I had too many tweets for the month, so I end-up splitting them into multiple blogs; and other times I had too little, so I end-up combining a few.
There got to be a better way!
[ 3/4/2012 UPDATE: Look at my follow-up post for a better way here ]
