title: I’m Taking Ownership of My Tweets
url: https://www.zachleat.com/web/own-my-tweets/
hash_url: 9c68e7d3dbc776b968571e3c3fcf9d14

<p>I’ve invested a lot into Twitter and I’ve received a lot of value from Twitter. I’ve made a lot of friends and professional connections on the site. I’ll be sad when Twitter goes away. Without a doubt, it will go away. It’s only a question of when.</p><p>I fully expect my personal website to outlive Twitter and as such have decided to take full ownership of the content I’ve posted there. In true <a href="https://indieweb.org/">IndieWeb</a> fashion, I’m taking ownership of my data.</p><p class="primarylink">Check out an early release of <a href="/twitter/">@zachleat’s Twitter Archive</a></p><h2 id="features">Features <a class="direct-link" href="#features" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2><ul><li>Each tweet has its own independent page: <code>zachleat.com/twitter/:id</code>.</li><li>Super <a href="/twitter/1169998370041208832/">fast HTML first rendering</a> (that tweet is 2.0 KB for the entire page)</li><li>Focus on the text first and less on the media. Links to external media are included (<a href="/twitter/1171621079745540096/">sample</a>) and Videos, images, and animated GIFs are supported. Media are not self hosted (yet) and uses a <code>max-height</code> of <code>10em</code>. All media are scrunched into a single row. Media is <em>not</em> upscaled like Twitter likes to do on their web site 😱</li><li>Links:<ul><li><a href="http://t.co">t.co</a> links are bypassed and original hyperlinks URLs are displayed and used.</li><li>Things are linkified the same as on Twitter: users, tweets being replied to, nicer non-truncated URLs</li><li>Nicer link formatting for links-to-tweets: <code>@username/:id</code>.</li><li>Internal links to my own tweets stay within the archive and don’t link out to Twitter.</li></ul></li><li>My tweets are threaded (both forwards and backwards) (<a href="/twitter/1171427770850672640/">sample</a>)</li><li>While I could display favorite and retweet counts, I don’t on individual tweet pages. I only display those on the <a href="/twitter/popular/">popular tweet page</a>.</li><li>Positive and negative sentiment analysis for each tweet (e.g. <code>Mood +8</code>). See the <a href="/twitter/sentiment/">most positive and most negative tweets</a>.</li><li>Support some markdown: I sometimes use <code>`backtick`</code> markdown notation for code in my tweet text. This translates to <code>&lt;code&gt;</code> properly.</li><li>Works initially from the <a href="https://twitter.com/settings/your_twitter_data">Download your Twitter data</a> feature, but also supplements with the Twitter API to update as new tweets are published (that way I don’t have to keep re-exporting every time).</li></ul><h2 id="analytics">Analytics <a class="direct-link" href="#analytics" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2><p>All of these are linked up on the <a href="/twitter/">Twitter Archive home page</a>. The only thing that surprised me here was that 60% of my tweets are replies—wow!</p><h2 id="the-backlog-%F0%9F%98%85">The Backlog 😅 <a class="direct-link" href="#the-backlog-%F0%9F%98%85" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2><ul><li><code>alt</code> on media. It was suspiciously <a href="/twitter/1171427770850672640/">missing from the data export</a>. 😱</li><li>Clean up the code a little bit for publishing so others can use it (this includes some outstanding color contrast issues 😱)</li><li>Use a better typeface 😎</li><li>Some kinda widget for embedding archive tweets in other pages.</li><li>Make a tool (maybe a bookmarklet) to automatically translate URLs from twitter to my archive.</li><li>Search</li><li>I purposefully do not include others tweets (unless I’ve retweeted them). I need to add a mechanism to remove retweets if they have been deleted upstream.</li><li>Retweet and favorite counts, while minimized, are not yet updated—they are fixed to when the tweet was inserted into the database.</li><li>Hashtags are not yet linked in tweet text 🤷‍♂️</li><li>Some nicer data visualizations and graphs</li></ul>
