Owning your tweets

I really like how Zach Leatherman has taken control over his tweets, and is sharing them on his site with some great analytics. He provides some insights into how he’s taking his tweets, and republishing them on his site in his post “I’m Taking Ownership of My Tweets” –

I fully expect my personal website to outlive Twitter and as such have decided to take full ownership of the content I’ve posted there. In true IndieWeb fashion, I’m taking ownership of my data.

Zach Leatherman

I started doing something similar on a test site here: @pauljacobson tweets – All the tweets

My test site uses a relatively old plugin that hasn’t been updated recently. At the same time, it seems to be working relatively called Ozh’ Tweet Archiver. I prefer how Zach has formatted his tweets, and how the images and links are modified for more sustainable presentation on the assumption that Twitter has gone offline.

I also really like how he’s captured replies, and has added analytics to his tweets to surface all sorts of insights such as more popular tweets, retweets data, and more.

I’ve love to know how he’s actually capturing, and reformatting his tweets, but I don’t see a link to the code he’s using for this. I’d eventually like to bring something like that to this site, so this site becomes a complete archive of my tweets too.

At least with the Ozh’ Tweet Archiver plugin running on my test site, I’ll have a WordPress archive that I can readily import as a starting point. I’d like to have linked media load from my site, and not as embeds from Twitter, for example. The idea here is to capture your tweets, and preserve them so they contain their links and media should Twitter no longer exist.