nathan williams | simiant.com

What do you suggest, a mind-map-esque interface to Google. Is ok.

OK so importing twitter favourites in bulk proved to be a bit of a challenge, but I managed to find a solution. Here’s how I did it:

You need to get the URL for the RSS feed of your favourites, basically they all follow this format:

http://twitter.com/favorites/[your_user_name].rss

mine is therefore:

http://twitter.com/favorites/nathanawilliams.rss

once you have this enter the following url into a browser:

http://twitter.com/favorites/[your_user_name].rss?count=500&page=1

Note the extra query at the end. This will return an RSS file into the browser with a larger number of items, rather than the default 20 (I’m not sure what the exact quantity is, but it’s not actually 500!). Copy and paste the RSS file into a text editor.

Next, enter the same url, but change page=1 to page=2 and so on until you have all the favourites returned, each time copy and pasting into a text file.

Next you will need to merge the resulting RSS files. Simply copy and paste all  into the first RSS file to make one big one. Make sure you do this in chronological order, ie newest to oldest, and make sure the RSS file has the correct header and footer. Finally save is thfile.

Next go to WordPress and import the file using the standard WordPress RSS import tool. On some hosts this may time out if you have a large number of posts. Simply keep re-importing the file until you are done, as WordPress will skip previously imported posts. That should do it.

Finally, install the excellent Tweet Import as mentioned in my previous post to capture any Tweets ‘favourited’ after the initial bulk import.

You can see the results here: www.simiant.com/tweets (currently using the P2 Theme)

So I’m using a separate installation of WordPress to ‘back-up’ my tweets, you can see it here www.simiant.com/tweets. It actually is missing the first few hundred, but this is down to an issue with the Twitter API being able to only go back as far as 3200, I believe. The instructions as to how I did it are to be found here. Why have I done this? Well Twitter is actually becoming a valuable repository of links that I have collected myself, and want to be able to reference at a later date. Twitter doesn’t really let you do this well, as it lacks intelligent search etc, WordPress on the other hand does. The only limitation of the technique referenced above, is that it doesn’t deal with Favourites. Personally, I use Twitter favourites as an alternative to Instapaper… stuff I want to read later, or save. I have however found a WordPress plugin that does this Tweet Import, again though, the limitation here is that it only goes back as far as 20 ie.e the default RSS number. I’m working on importing the archive of favourites, I’ll update you when I’ve worked out how!…