I used to love Martin Hawksey’s tweet archive which I used for quite a while and mirrored on the web.
Yesterday I was reading Alan’s post: My Digital Cleanup: IFTTT – CogDogBlog which explains how he now archives toots with make.com a sort of ifttt replacement. This sounds very useful. I’ve quite often failed looking for old toots with the mastodon interface.
This made me think a bit. I’d been playing with json to sqlite for my flickr photos, On this Flickr Day. I wondered if I could do this with my toots too.
Turns out I could take a very similar approach:
- A bash script pulls down all my previous toots to a sqlite database.
- Another script updates the database.
- A php file provides a search and display.
- The search can be viewed in the browser using a simple php server.
There are a few things that could be improved.
- I’ve not used any authentication. So I just get public toots and boosts. That is all I want.
- The web page produced is pretty simple, if there is no search it shows all my toots. This is just over 1000 I probably need some pagination.
I’ve a version running on my raspberry pi. Search Toots this is organised slightly differently from the one I run locally on my mac. The scripts & database are not directly in the public_html directory.
I’ve put the files on github: troutcolor/localtoots in case anyone is interested.
I had a bit of AI help, bouncing ideas, tidying things up & especially all of the getting the files on git hub. I’ve done this so rarely I’d no recall of how to do it.
Featured Image: n92_w1150 | Dictionnaire universel d’histoire naturelle :. P… | Flickr Public domain by Biodiversity Heritage Library