Sillybean

Twitter Archive, WordPress Importer

I’ve finally managed to create a complete archive of my Twitter account — and none too soon, as I’m quickly approaching the 3200-tweet limit for exports. I’ll probably mess with the theme later, but for now I’ve followed Theme Lab’s tutorial more or less exactly. My only problem was that I had a hard time getting all the tweets! I tried several of the backup services, but Twitter was constantly having issues, and the backups would only go back four months or so. Finally, I found Brad Touesnard’s Twitter RSS Importer for WordPress. That worked a treat, once I updated it for WordPress 3.0. (I’ve sent Brad the updated version; he says he’ll post it soon.) It kept cutting me off after 71 pages every time, but I tweaked the code to change the starting page to 71, and then 142, and after a few tries I finally got everything. If you need to do the same, look for these lines:

$url = 'http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/'.$this->username.'.rss?page=';
$i = 1;

… and just change the 1 to whatever page number you need. (Check how many tweets were imported and divide by 20.)

HOORAY. Finally, a complete backup!