Today we launched a new feature: importing an archive of your tweets to Micro.blog. This is available to all paid subscriptions and can be accessed on the web under Posts → “…” → Import.
Very early Micro.blog customers may remember that we used to have a Twitter import feature alongside our traditional blog import from WordPress, Tumblr, and other platforms. We disabled this years ago because I kept hearing from people who realized that it was a mess importing tens of thousands of tweets into their new blog. I’ve taken that feedback to build this new feature into something that I think works much better.
There are a few unique twists with how this works:
- When you import your tweets, we create a new blog in your Micro.blog account just for the tweets. This is in the format username-tweets.micro.blog. There’s no extra charge for this blog.
- This new blog stores all your tweets as blog posts. Micro.blog also copies any photos in tweets to this tweets blog.
- A new plug-in is installed that links your existing blog with the tweets blog. This plug-in provides a streamlined interface for browsing tweets by month or searching across all your tweets.
You can see my own tweets on my blog here: manton.org/tweets
Structuring the tweet storage this way means we can leverage many of the powerful features built in to Micro.blog:
- There’s a new API that the plug-in uses. You can make your own version of the plug-in from GitHub by copying its HTML and JavaScript. You can even access the API of tweets from apps and blogs outside of Micro.blog.
- The separate tweets blog is a full Micro.blog-hosted blog so you can use custom Hugo templates to make your own web interface for browsing tweets, or add your own domain name to it.
- If you have multiple Twitter accounts, you can create additional blogs for those accounts. The trick is to name the blog with a “-tweets” suffix. (We only include one extra tweets blog for free. The rest will be added to your subscription just like any additional blog.)
Because the storage is just blogs, you can use existing apps to manage the tweets and photos. For example, you can use MarsEdit to download and search all your tweets. It’s also easy to zap all your tweets and start over without touching your actual blog.
Some limitations: I’ve decided to only copy photos from the archive, not other types of media. If you have a lot of photos, expect this to take a long time as Micro.blog extracts the photos from your archive and uploads them to our servers. You can keep an eye on what it’s doing on Account → View logs. I expect we may tweak this as we get feedback from more people.
Enjoy! I hope this makes it a little easier to say goodbye to Twitter.
