Rich Burridge's Blog : Weblog

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Monday March 02, 2009

Backing Up Your Twitter Posts

Now I'm twittering I wanted to make sure I had a way to locally save my ~~pearls of wisdom~~ drivel. From googling, I'd found tweetake and twistory but didn't like the idea of passing over my username and password to a site I didn't know.

I then stumbled on a Python frontend to the Twitter API. I downloaded the compressed tarball and unpacked, built and installed it with:

  $ gzip -dc python-twitter-0.5.tar.gz | tar -xvf -
  $ cd python-twitter-0.5
  $ python setup.py build
  $ pfexec python setup.py install

Now "backing up" my tweets is as simple as running:

  $ python backup.py > richb-tweets.txt

where backup.py is:

    import twitter

    api = twitter.Api()
    statuses = api.GetUserTimeline("richburridge")
    for s in statuses:
        date_ts = " ".join(s.created_at.split()[:4])
        print "%s: %s\n" % (date_ts, s.text)

for output that looks like:

Mon Mar 02 20:39:10: Oooh! Twitter has a Python front-end to it's API: http://code.google.com/p/python-twitter/ I can see hours of tinkering ahead.

Mon Mar 02 19:10:46: Added twitter monitor thingy to left column on main blog. Didn't help that Twitter went oopsie while I was debugging this.

...

(Adjust the "richburridge" user name to your own, if you want to use this).

Still lots more to explore with python-twitter, but that's enough for today.

[Technorati Tag: Twitter]