I joined Twitter in April of 2008. I have participated mostly as a lurker but have contributed 3,589 tweets. Since I have been introduced to the IndieWeb concept, one of my goals has been to find a way to import my tweets into WordPress.
DsgnWrks Twitter Importer Plugin
I found a plugin, DsgnWrks Twitter Importer, which was not tested with my version of WordPress, but I thought I would try it out. I first tried it on my sandbox and then on this site.
Setup
After activating the plugin, the Settings link appears beside the plugin name. Alternately you can access the settings from TOOLS > TWITTER IMPORTER.
Setup the user by adding the Twitter username and clicking the SAVE button.
Once the user has been saved additional options are presented that are specific to the import.
I selected the following: Status = Private, Post-Type = A custom post type, Category = Tweet, Tag = Tweet. (As I setup my IndieWeb setup, I am still deciding on my Categories and Tags.) As I learned during a few uh ohs, it is good to set attributes that can be filtered and a Private Status or specific category or tag will help with this.
At the conclusion I clicked the SAVE button. Well actually, I clicked the IMPORT button the first time and learned from that lesson that I should have clicked SAVE first. Be careful to not click IMPORT before you click the SAVE to save the options or they will default to the original . 🙂
The Import
Number of Tweets Imported
I did not set the Import From This Date field. The plugin imported Tweets back to 2018 and not to 2008.
Import from This Date
I went back to my Sandbox and tried to change the import date to 2008-04 to see if all of them would import. I could only select 2010-01, which I did. I saved that selection and tried again. It appears that only 199 tweets are imported because the same number imported as when I did the original import with no date.
Results
- 199 tweets imported.
- I could not import all of the tweets dated back to 2008.
- The tweets were placed into the custom post type I selected.
- The status was the one I selected.
- The tweet was categorized as I specified.
- The tweet tags were placed into the tag field.
- No images were imported.
Screenshots
Screenshots of the process are below.
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Activate Plugin -
Settings -
Setup Twitter Username -
Set Options -
Import -
Imported Tweets -
Sample Tweet -
View of Tweet -
Import From this Date
Conclusion
If I were a more prolific Twitter user, I reach out to the developer and ask if there is a way to import all Tweets, all Tweets from 2008, or a way to have a beginning and end date so that tweets could be imported in batches. I am not sure if that would be successful due to the dates shown in the Support site and the Github repository.
I believe the most important thing that I did was to download my archive of Tweets from Twitter which included images. My Twitter archive is important but based on the type of user I was, it’s not that important. If someone creates a way to import my downloaded archive, I will be able to import the rest. I have all of the images already. But it would be nice to have all of the shared articles.
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