Pushing and Pulling the Twitter Archive

There are probably 2 folk who have a slight interest in this rather geeky post. It does not have much to do with ICT in the classroom.

I’ve been using Martin Hawksey‘s twitter archiver for a while now. This archived my tweets to Google Drive and made them available online.

The other day I saw Martin tweet a change. Google Drive will drop the ability to serve webpages soon so Martin has updated the setup to use GitHub. He also took the time to make the setup a lot more user friendly (if you have a github account and a very little experience with git).

The set up involves downloading your twitter archive from twitter. You then set up your GitHub Pages – Website. To this you push your downloaded archive, connect to Martin’s script and away you go. The local git stuff is just used to kick off the pages site, which then is updated from the script. It works a treat: My Twitter archive. I am not trying to replicate the instructions here, the set up page has that covered.

What I did wonder was if you could pull the updates back down locally. Sort of PESOS, but to my hard drive rather than own site. I guess it could go truly PESOS if I knew how to push it out to johnjohnston.info (thinks, maybe I do 1).

This is how I pull the github stuff back down to my hard driver.

A very simple shell script:

cd /Users/john/Sites/troutcolor.github.io/;git pull > /Users/john/Desktop/loga.txt

saved in a file and the file made executable, (the loga.txt file was just for testing).

A launchd 2 configuration file, made with Lingon runs the script every day.

Featured Image: A Bird in the Hand by Julie Falk used under a CC-BY-NC license.

1. As I wrote this I realise that git-ftp could do this. After configuring it in my local folder I added git ftp push to the script. This will push to my website, so My Twitter archive on johnjohnston.info. ↩

2. launchd seem to be thing to use instead of cron to run things periodically on a mac. Lingon simplifies creating and handling them. I’m using the old 2x version of Lingon, it seems to work.↩