April 11th, 2009 by electricbob
Why I use Twitter Tools to backup my tweets on my blog (and future plans)
I’ve been retweeting (RT) with the #brilliant hashtag so I could keep a record of things I want to remember. Twitter only keeps tweets for between one and three months. That means I’ll loose the things I want to remember if I don’t back the tweets up myself.
Twitter Tools is a WordPress plugin that retrieves your tweets, storing them in the WordPress database. It can create a daily digest of tweets as a post. And it has a sidebar widget for displaying your most recent tweets. I did have to hack this plugin so it would create a daily post from midnight to midnight (the author still hasn’t fixed this, even though I’ve tried to give him the patch – meh).
And, as validation, a friend of mine told me the other day that he wanted a link I had posted – he intended to search my blog for the item instead of using Twitter Search.
So what changes do I want to make? I want to integrate my blog and web site; as part of that I want to take the daily twitter posts out of the default timeline; they should be searchable but not treated as new content to show people visiting the site. I also need to finish fixing up the Twitter Tools plugin – I want to patch the latest version and get that working.
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+Bob Hays
- I'm a father and husband, have two schipperkes, like to read, compose music, travel. And I manage a couple software development teams at DIRECTV.
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2:17 am on July 14th, 2010
Twitter really doesn’t keep track of my tweets indefinitely?
are you sure about that?
I’m pretty sure it keeps them forever. (otherwise they’re losing a lot of potentially valuable information — just like Google never (really) deletes any searches.)
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4:51 am on July 14th, 2010
They won’t let you have them indefinitely…. I agree, I’m sure they keep them, but try a search for a tweet over about 2 – 3 weeks ago.
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