HARPOON: Own your tweets, back them up, search them, plain-text them...
, from its UserScripts page. (You need to have the GreaseMonkey Firefox extension, version 0.8 or more, installed first.)
Enough is enough. As much as I love Twitter, they can’t seem to get their search act together. Try it right now, search in Twitter for something you tweeted about last week. Most likely outcome is you won’t find it, at all. It’s lost, buried, retrievable only through tiresome, trial-and-error paging. Google does scarcely a better job. How can this be?
The Husband: Isn’t that why people keep diaries? To be read by someone else? Otherwise why keep them? Nagiko: To know about themselves.
Click it to start downloading ALL your tweets, which will be displayed as soon as they’re downloaded. Note that if you have thousands of tweets, the downloading will take a while.
Now that you have all your tweets on one BIG page, searching them is as simple as using Firefox’s find in page. Backing them up is just a matter of File > Save Page As, or you can use the nifty Scrapbook extension to save it and keep it handy.
Personally, I just copy-pasted the whole shebang to a plain text file, which is what the script is really optimized for. My idea was not to loose any information on the way to all text, so the “about 5 minutes ago” dates are fixed, and all important URLs (the tweet’s, the reply-to’s) are made visible
Hope it’s useful.
Inspired by the Format Amazon Wishlist script.
5 Comments
That’s a very clever hack! It worked like a charm for me, and I’m astounded by how small the script is!
I found that copying the entire page with Command-A, pasting it into MacVim, and removing the top and bottom parts worked well for me. It may have been easier, though, if it dumped all of the tweets into a textarea. Then I could have clicked in the textarea and pressed Command-A to select all before copying and pasting.
I like how you fit your link neatly into their UI rather than sticking it somewhere on top of it.
Ben, I’m happy you liked it!
I considered the textarea solution, where Javascript can select all text, but decided to keep it for the next release—it’s somewhat inelegant…
Yup, the code’s pretty small, jQuery is so amazing…
The combo that I used to copy the text was simply one click at the beginning, รขลห+↓, scroll up a bit, and a final shift click.
Thanks for the feedback and support. :)
Wow. I didn’t know about shift-click. That’s pretty nifty!
You did know, and I can prove it! :)
Hello guys! Is this nifty program still working? I can’t make it work using my Firefox browser, and twitter account.