Doing Things The Hard Way

Anyone who follows my RSS feed (the one that includes all my Tweets, that is) might be wondering if I quit Twitter cold-turkey. The answer would be no.

What actually happened was that, only a few months after I ponied up the $10 for the most recent version of the previously-free Movable Type plug-in that automatically pulls in my tweets, Twitter went and changed its API (basically, the way that developers interact with the service). So, now the plug-in doesn’t work. Yes, I did alert the developer, and he said he’s planning to update the plug-in… but it’s honestly not at the top of his priority list. And I totally understand.

Twitter doesn’t keep tweets forever. At least, it doesn’t allow them to be displayed and searched forever: it only keeps a user’s last 3,200 tweets. I’ve been on Twitter since mid-2008, and I have 9,621 tweets. So, over the past four years, I’ve averaged about 180 tweets per month. If my math is right, that means that Twitter will start dropping off my tweets after about a year and a half? My blog goes back to 2001. That’s not gonna fly.

I can’t program Perlscript. I don’t have time to learn. So, if I can’t reprogram this broken plug-in, I guess I’ll pull in my tweets manually, a few at a time.

Yes, I’m that anal about saving all this crap for posterity. Or at least for my future reference.

At least I’m separating the wheat from the chaff, and only pasting in tweets that really matter. Maybe in the future, when the plug-in is back up and running, I’ll have it skip Instagram photos, to keep things a little cleaner.

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