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).
