I just added a page to my home page where you can search and browse all my tweets from the past 15 years of tweeting. That’s 17,900 of them. And I guarantee that each one of them is worth not just reading but pondering. Let me put it like this: Every one of those tweets will be on the test, people!

In truth, I expect it to be one of the least-visited pages I’ve ever posted, and that’s saying something. But it’s a liberating feeling to know not only do I own my history, but there’s an easy way to make it available to a public that has no reason to care about it.

I used this simple, free tool. It requires that you download your tweets from Twitter, using the site’s service, which you’ll find by clicking on the dots under the “More” link on the left side of Twitter.com, and then “Settings & Account” > “Settings & Privacy” > “Your Account” > “Download and archive of your data.” It takes Twitter a day or two to compile your archive. (Mine was about 65mb if you’re worried about size.)

The free tool will upload the resulting zip file to a site of yours. Unzip it from a terminal and you’re done. If you don’t want to work in a terminal, you can unzip it on your local computer and upload the many many files to your site. It’s slower but it works.

Thank you Darius Kazemi for this tool!

PS: I am @dweinberger at https://mastodon.social

PPS: The ungrammatical title of this post comes from the even more ungrammatical book, Stephen Colbert’s I am America and So Can You!

Categories: social media dw