csexton / twitter_archive

Archive twitter history for posterity's sake

twitter_archive¶ ↑

• github.com/csexton/twitter_archive

Description¶ ↑

Archiving utility for Twitter.

I use my blog as a way to chronicle the things in my life, and I noticed with the introduction of Twitter into my normal routine I found that I was not blogging as much. What I wanted to be able to do is incorporate the twitters into my blog timeline. And while I was able to do some JavaScript trickery to display the twitters on my blog, they were not in the blog. Now if I ever want to go back and look up exactly what day my son got his second tooth, I can do so by digging through the blog archives.

twitter_archive supports multiple backends. I use Blogger, so I have support for that, as well as a very simple yaml archive backend that was intended for testing, but would provide a pretty good (and easy to parse) plan text backup of Twitter.

Usage ¶ ↑

twitter_archive [options]

Options¶ ↑

-h, --help          Displays help message
-v, --version       Display the version, then exit
-V, --verbose       Verbose output
-I, --install       Install example yaml config file

Synopsis¶ ↑

Yaml Archive Backend¶ ↑

This requires a config file placed in the user’s home directory:

Example ~/twitter_archive.yml for use with the yaml archive backend:

accounts: - name: fuzzymonk - name: amperecat - name: jnunemaker yaml_file: /home/your-user-name/twitter_archive/posts.yml

You can enter mutiple twitter accounts, and it will simply interate through them. You should know that twitter_archive will make seperate requests for each account, so unles you have been IP whitelisted by Twitter you can hit their rate limits pretty easily.

Blogger Archive Backend¶ ↑

this requires a config file placed in the user’s home directory:

Example ~/twitter_archive.yml for use with the Blogger archive backend:

accounts: - name: fuzzymonk blogger_user: blogger-user # Normally your gmail address blogger_pass: blogger-password blogger_title: Twitter # The title you want for you blog post blogger_id: 1234567891234567890 # backend: blogger

To find your Blogger Blog ID refer to the Blogger Help Center

twitter_archive was intended to be run as a cron job, prolly once a day. It will post in a digest format, collecting all the twitters into one blog post.

Install¶ ↑

get the gem:

sudo gem install twitter_archive

Edit crontab to add twitter_archive:

$ crontab -e

Then Add a line like the following:

0 0 * * * twitter_archive > /home/your-user-name/logs/twitter_archive.log

This will run everyday at midnight. You can leave off the “> /home/…/twitter_archive.log” if you don’t want to keep logs.

License¶ ↑

see LICENSE file.