cre8d design

Earlier this week, musician John Mayer closed down his Twitter account with millions of followers to focus on his Tumblr blog named “One forty plus”, a not-so-subtle reference to the maximum length of a tweet.

Of his decision he wrote:

“I had 3.3 million Twitter (Twitter) followers back in March April when I announced that I’d be predominantly posting on Tumblr, a site that takes all of 25 seconds to sign up for. Five months later I have just passed 50,000 followers, a fraction of my Twitter base… I will leave the opining up to you, but I think I made the right move.”

While many speculate why someone would shut down their Twitter account when they could still focus on blogging and, say, just auto-tweet new blog posts to a massive audience, I want to focus more on something I’ve been noticing as of late: a renaissance to blogging from those who have been hooked on Twitter.

At the recent New Zealand Wordcamp conference, I heard Courtney Lambert refer to your blog/website as your “official channel” and the phrase resonated with me.

It’s all very well to have a Twitter account, Facebook fan page, LinkedIn profile etc (or whatever the next big buzz is) and be connected with lots of people, but there’s always an underlying usefulness and need for a central place which is easy to access, find via search engines and search internally for archives (not easily done with Twitter or Facebook) for an audit/record of things said in the past. A site you are in complete control of and can point people through to whenever you need to say something a bit more than 140 characters.

It’s been fascinating to see more and more of my friends and those I follow on Twitter taking up blogging – the desire to communicate publicly and with more freedom than is offered in Twitter and Facebook reminds me of the importance of blogging, even though it’s been around so much longer than the other two.

Perhaps this is what John Mayer has been discovering.

Last night I was interviewed by David Farrier on 3 News about Twitter and the recent Christchurch earthquake. It was a shame more of the interview didn’t go to air where we talked about some of the interesting interactions, but that’s the nature of the soundbite.

You can see the video clip here.

Last year, I started a blog on social archiving – about creating physical archives of digital memories. I’m still fascinated by that, but also wanted to revise again how I could archive in one spot (if possible) my personal blogs and interests online.

I’ve been blogging on a few different personal blogs since 2002 and have finally got around to aggregating them all together in one spot, over at rachelcunliffe.com. (I’m using the default WordPress design for now while I focus on content.)

Combining my blogs

It was surprisingly easy to take my original journal blog which had been offline for ages, it was running WordPress 1.5 (what a blast from the past seeing the old admin interface). That blog was my entry into the world of blogging and I met so many wonderful people through that. Ahh, the good old days of blogging where it was so fresh, so new and such a small world (it seemed).

To start resurrecting the blog, I updated the wp-config.php file to the new host database login information, disabled all the plugins, deleted all the spam, made a backup and uploaded WordPress 3.0. After seeing a number of problems upgrading WordPress in a big leap, I was pleasantly surprised to see my blog all back and running, using a theme I made in the summer of 2006! An export of the blog posts split up by about six month chunks (you don’t want the import files to be bigger than 2MB) and then importing into rachelcunliffe.com didn’t take long at all.

The next step was exporting from a WordPress.com blog I wrote on for a while in 2008 then abandoned. This time it was a much simpler process a quick export and import.

Importing my Tweets

I’ve been also investigating how to archive my tweets. Twitter tools is perfect for tweets you do after adding the plugin to WordPress, but I also wanted all my old Tweets stored in WordPress.

There’s a really simple plugin (Twitter importer) which actually imports all your old tweets into a certain category of your choice in one step – no need to worry about exporting your Tweets first. However, the plugin current currently has no options e.g. no filtering out of “@” replies or retweets. I got around this by quickly tweaking the plugin code:

Add:

if (substr($post_title,0,1) != "@" && substr($post_title,0,2) != "RT")

before:

$post_id = wp_insert_post($post);

I did notice that sometimes the plugin didn’t work first time around or didn’t pull them all in, wait a while and then run it again – you can run it multiple times and it won’t make duplicates.

Until I work out how best to display all these tweets, I’m using the Advanced Category Excluder plugin to hide all the old tweets from the homepage and the feed, and just put have on their own tweets category page.

Importing my Facebook Status Updates

Facebook is a little buggy when it comes to this, but I’ve made a simple script to export your Facebook status updates to a CSV file. It’s buggy because sometimes it works, sometimes later on it doesn’t work. It’s also buggy because it only pulls out actual status updates, not links you share or photos you add in your status box. Oh, and it doesn’t go back before about August 2008 when they released a new version of Facebook. That being said, it still exported out over 700 of my status updates.

I then played around with the CSV file a little to get it into the right format that the WordPress CSV importer plugin requires. These all went into my Facebook status updates category and are also hidden from the homepage for now. Going forward, I’ll either need to use Twitter again to update my Facebook status (using Selective Twitter or find a way to bring in status updates one-by-one automatically (just like Twitter tools does).