Build a Custom Twitter Archive with WordPress

Thanks to Doug Bowman’s blog post, I learned how to build a custom archive of my tweets. It’s very handy for finding that elusive “hey, didn’t I tweet about that a few weeks ago?” thought. Here’s how it works.

Visit custom Twitter archive

Using WordPress to archive tweets

1. Install WordPress.
2. Install Twitter Tools & connect your Twitter account.
3. Set “Create a blog post from each of your tweets?” to “Yes.”

This will pull your future tweets into WordPress, making them browsable & searchable.

What about past tweets?

1. Visit TweetBackup.com & connect your Twitter account (using OAuth).
2. Wait a minute for TweetBackup to finish grabbing your tweets (limited to 3,200 tweets).
3. Export your archive in RSS format & save to your computer.
4. Use WordPress’ RSS importer to import the TweetBackup file from your computer.

That’s it! This will import all your old tweets to WordPress, creating single posts for each tweet.

Bonus

1. TweetBackup prefaces each tweet with your username. Use Search Regex to remove it.
2. Past tweets from TweetBackup won’t have linked URLs. Use Autolink URI to add them.
3. WordPress’ native search kinda sucks. Use Search Everything to improve it.