Posts tagged with "Twitter"

Since mid-2023 my photoblog has been broken. As I mentioned at the time, the issue was that this second incarnation of the blog had started life as a proper mashup of some web tools, and the heart of it was Twitter.

It all started to fall apart when Twitter got its new owner, and APIs became expensive, and other tools would not or could not work with it any more, and then it really fell apart when I finally nuked my account.

So since then the blog has been sat about, unused and unloved, with a lot of broken links and images.

Thankfully, though, the pipeline that I had going had been designed with this sort of problem in mind: part of what I had going also made a backup of the photos I took to Google Drive and to Google Photos. So when I got to a point the other day where BlogMore was usable I decided I should rescue the photos and rebuild the blog.

After downloading the full feed of the Blogger.com-hosted blog, I threw together some Python code that took the data (thanks to feedparser for helping with that), matched up the posts with the images I had in Google Drive, slugged the names, wrote some Markdown and copied some images, and I had the source of a fresh blog.

The result of all of this can be seen up on seen-by.davep.dev.

I strongly suspect this is going to remain a pretty static site. At the moment I've given no thought whatsoever as to how I might have this populate in the way the old version of it did. Quite simply the old version was:

1. Take photo
2. Post to Twitter with a specific hashtag
3. Have IFTTT notice this and create the blog post, make backups
4. ...
5. Profit?

I suppose, this time around, I could have something monitor my Mastodon account, or my pixelfed account, and then trigger a similar process; but then that would need something akin to IFTTT running and interacting with GitHub and creating the Markdown and kicking off a build process and...

Eh, maybe one day. For now, though, I'll be happy that I've rescued this particular incarnation of my photoblog and then think about if and how I carry on with something similar in the future.

Meanwhile... this has got me thinking. The original blog is backed up on WordPress. It's been sat there, all sad and neglected, ever since Posterous disappeared. I wonder if I can export all the data from there and mash it into this new version...

Recently I've been on a bit of a "turn stuff into Markdown files and slap them in an Obsidian Vault" trip. This kicked off a couple of months back when I made a decision unrelated to coding.

On and off, since my teenage years, I've kept journals. Since those teenage years it's been more off than on, but a couple of times in my adult life it's been really helpful to actually write one. The last time this happened was early 2019. It was pretty vital I did that at the time and it was a really sensible and helpful decision, and an approach to the situation I was in that I'd recommend to anyone (and have done on occasion to anyone going through the same thing).

The actual motivation for starting that particular journal is long behind me, but I'd got into the habit of writing it and so, until a couple or so months back, I kept jotting something down every day. But I came to the realisation that I didn't need to and that it had become something of a chore.

I'd been using an application called Journey. It's a great app, does the job well, but was also suffering from the creep of "AI" (I've had a few apps ion my arsenal that don't need it, acquire a useless "AI" feature). This privacy-problematic change of direction, combined with the realisation that I didn't need to write about my day, every day, any more, made me decide it was time to stop and cancel the subscription.

Thankfully Journey has a pretty comprehensive export option so I used it and didn't think too much more about it for a while.

Meanwhile I also had a subscription to Evernote that I didn't really use any more. Within it I had held a handful of years of journal entries from a decade or so ago, along with other "remember this for some point in the future" stuff. For the longest time I was on some really cheap tier that didn't exist any more, one that was low enough that I didn't really notice the cost go out each month so I kept putting off exporting things and closing it all down until "next month".

Then I got an email from them to say they were forcing me onto some new tier that was more expensive. So that was the final straw there. I made an export of what I had in Evernote and closed that account down too.

A wee while went past and then I got to thinking that it might be interesting to try and combine both these sources into one archived journal. I had stuff from around 2010 to 2015, and I also had stuff from 2019 until 2024; the former in the Evernote archive and the latter in the Journey archive. Surely I could write a couple of tools to turn that data into one consolidated Obsidian Vault?

Over the course of a couple of weekends journey2md and evernote2md were born. While both of those tools work differently, they're both designed to populate the same Obsidian Vault. Once I was happy with this I did the mass conversion and I was happy with the result.

Now I have years of journal entries, all converted to Markdown files and made available for reading via an application that lets me rummage through history using dates and tags and all sorts of other searching.

So I was happy with that and didn't give it much more though.

Then last week I got to thinking...

Twitter has turned into the worst place possible and I can't for the life of me think why any right-thinking person who has an ounce of humanity or has anything approaching a humanistic outlook on life would remain an active user. Honestly I stuck it out longer than was sensible, but in June 2023 I finally quit for good.

Back when the new owner was confirmed I, like a lot of people, extracted my archive. It's since been sat in storage doing nothing, yet there's a lot of data in there that could be interesting to work with, or just to go back and look through. So last week's thought was "why don't I also turn this into an Obsidian Vault?".

So I did...

The tool I built to do this is bird2glass. As you'll see in the README it makes a few assumptions about the state of Twitter archive dumps and also what a user wants from this. Personally I'm pleased with the result.

The main aim of the tool is to break the tweets down into a hierarchy of year, month and day...

...and also to connect them with any account that was being replied to or mentioned in some way...

This user view is handy when viewing backlinks, as it gives you a list of all the tweets that mention that user (and, of course, if you're into Obsidian's graph it will make for some interesting connections within there).

I sense there's more I can do with this, and I imagine I will continue to tinker with it. Meanwhile though, if that sounds like something you'd benefit from do feel free to grab it and play with it and hack on it. Keep in mind the notes and assumptions that are in the README, and really be prepared for a lot of files to be created if you did a lot of tweeting like I did (I do think that over 50,000 individual files for an Obsidian Vault is a bit silly, if I'm honest).

Meanwhile... I might need to look at other applications and think about how I can turn the data into useful Markdown collections!

Almost seven years ago I took up maintaining an ad-hoc photoblog again. I say again because I'd had one once before. I'd kicked that off back in the late 200xs, with my little HTC Magic, and hosted it on Posterous. Eventually Posterous was shut down, mostly because the company (or at least the team behind it)) had been bought up by Twitter. When kicking off the blog this time I decided on a few things:

• I'd host it on Blogger.com; it had been around for long enough, and of course Google could be trusted to keep something that big up and running for good.
• I'd keep multiple backup copies of the images and file them in useful ways (I keep copies in Google Photos, on Google Drive, on iCloud and locally).
• As much as possible I'd automate the process of doing some, if not all of this.

At this point, while it was kind of old as an idea, this felt very much like one of those things that was perfect to do in a Web 2.0 way; the good old reliable mashable web!

So the plan became this:

• Every post would be a tweet, posted to Twitter with a #photoblog tag.
• I'd use ifttt to keep an eye on my tweets and when it saw one with that tag it would extract the image, make a post to Blogger, drop a copy into Google Drive, and do a couple of other things too.
• Every week or so I'd do some manual checks to make sure everything is looking okay.

This worked. Mostly. It ran fine for a few years, with very few problems. I'd take a photo, manipulate the heck out of it for the emotional effect I was going for (that was the point of the blog; it was all about the messing with the image), tweet it, and Web 2.0 magic would happen.

Then the odd issue started to crop up. At one point Twitter made changes to how images were stored, or something, and the ifttt recipe broke for a wee while; then they changed the way that public posts could be seen (long before the Musk-era bullshit) and that broke things again, and so on. I forget the details but at every point I was able to nurse it back to life and things carried on.

Recently, of course, it all fell apart when Musk took over Twitter and massively ruined it, turning it into the steaming pile it is now¹. I've honestly lost track of which change broke what, and of course I also gave up even trying to use Twitter (the drip, drip, drip of right-wing hate politics got to a point where I could not find a way to make it work any more). So that's when I decided to cut Twitter out altogether.

This had actually started a little earlier than that, when the whole API fiasco kicked off. When that came in ifttt had to remove Twitter things from its free tier; I was on the free tier. I was on the free tier only because I didn't need anything the paid service offered. If Twitter had been "normal" and this change had been made I'd have happily paid -- I don't mind paying for things I find useful.

But, nope, given all the context, I bailed.

So by that point I decided the easiest thing to do was to simply hand-add posts to Blogger, and also along the way post to a pixelfed account instead, reposting those posts from my Fosstodon account. Not ideal, needing more manual input, but also I was thinking that once I find a good flow I could probably automate the whole thing again.

Anyway, that's the point I'd reached. Twitter was 100% out of the workflow, there was a bit more manual intervention, but the primary location for the photos was still getting updated.

Then yesterday I noticed this:

I don't actually quite know exactly what's going on here, and at this point I really don't care. My working hypothesis is this: when ifttt added the images to the Blogger posts, it was doing so in a way that it was using the image hosted by Twitter. Because of this, either due to some change in the Twitter API, or perhaps because I've locked down my Twitter account, the images can't be served any more. That's my best guess anyway.

I don't really care to dig deeper than that.

But, yeah, this is another example of the long-growing rot of the dream of Web 2.0. I'm not surprised; I'm not angry; I'm just disappointed.

Thankfully I have all the images saved (see backup options above), so I can go back and edit the posts and drop fresh copies of the images into them. There's 100s of posts affected so this is going to take quite a while; I mean, sure, I could probably do it in a day if I sat and did nothing else, but I have other things to do.

Another option would of course be to create a fresh blog using my own tools; that would be simple enough. I have the images, they're all set with the right date and time, recreating things would be fairly trivial (post titles a slight problem but I could work around that); a tool like mkdocs or Pelican plus some Python code to recreate the posts from the images would be a fun couple of hours mucking about. But... I have a lot of posts on Blogger and all the URLs are stable and still there many years later.

Perhaps I could automate the "fixing" of the broken posts? I wonder what the Blogger API is like to work with?

PS: If you've read this and feel that what's really needed is a "helpful" comment that self-hosting is the solution; please sit on that and read the above again (and, you know, look over the rest of this blog and the entirety of my time and content on the Internet in general and the Web in particular, going back to the mid-90s).

A few years back, not long after I got my first smartphone (a HTC Magic), I started maintaining a photoblog that was based around photos I took on that phone. The blog itself was very important to me as it covered a pretty difficult time in my life -- many of the images on it contained and conveyed feelings and emotions that seem a world away now, but which I never want to totally forget.

It served as a visual diary, a note to future me.

And, hopefully, it provided some entertainment for those who viewed it.

Sadly the company who hosted it closed down and the whole thing was lost, except for a hasty (and only partially successful) backup to a Wordpress blog.

After the blog died I sort of lost interest in trying to maintain one and, to some degree, lost interest in active photography in general. Between the blog disappearing and another disappointing event relating to photography I sort of lost confidence in myself and my ability to dare to publish photos online.

This year, despite how shitty it's been for the world in general, has been a really good one for me. Lots of positive changes have happened and continue to happen and I noticed that I was starting to do the phone-based photoblog thing again, albeit only via twitter.

Finally, this week, I've cracked and decided to make it "official". My old "Seen by davep" blog is reborn, with new content and the same old purpose. You can find it here: seenbydavep.blogspot.com

The blog itself is still driven by twitter and the posts will still appear on twitter. In the background I have an IFTTT process running, watching for any tweet of mine with the #photoblog tag and creating a post on the blog from it.

As for how often and what the content will be... simple: it'll be when I see something that I need to capture.