How To Back Up Your Twitter Stream

So there’s a lot of discussion about backing up your status update stream on twitter. There are several products available that you are certainly welcome to pay for but if you are a long time JAFDIP reader you will know that we like to offer some more frugal possibilities.

This simple twitter hack will backup your status update starting from the moment that you turn it on. It is not something that will dig into your past tweets and archive them.I my estimation it is a fruitless endeavor to try and pull back those ancient tweets as no program can dig beyond that last 3200 updates.

Before you begin you will need to inventory you personal computer to determine if you have an application that can not only read an RSS feed but download the content as well. The example system that I will use to demonstrated this simple hack is a MacBook Pro.

The first step is to change how your system handles RSS feed data. TO do this you must open the preferences panel for Safari. If left to the default then Safari will attempt to handle all of your RSS reading needs which is just not going to work for our purposes. By changing it to the Mail app you have much greater control. It’s actually one of the hidden gems of the Mail app. As you can see from the following image the change is simple and immediately effective.

One word of caution however it will not retroactively change RSS feeds you’ve previously viewed. From this point going forward any RSS feed you select will open your Mail app asking if you want to install the feed in your account. For obvious reasons you will want to do this. One of the main benefits of moving your RSS feeds to Mail is that the text can be viewed while you are offline so you can always catch up on your RSS feeds when other things aren’t working. Another benefit is that you can create rules that alert you when key content is received but that’s not really in the scope of this article.

As I have already mentioned the next step is relatively straight forward. Simply highlight and cut the following URL then paste it into Safari. Remember to substitute your ID for the XXXXX‘s and then hit enter. The Mail app will open and once you approve the feed it will download the recent updates.

http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=xxxxx

Mail will automatically retrieve all subsequent updates based on the settings in the Preferences Pane. The default is every 30 minutes.

At this point you can experiment with various options and even try to setup some rules if you like, however; this is a topic I will discuss in a forthcoming article. The important thing is that as long as the machine has a reliable internet connection it will check your stream regularly and download those tweets. This can be very handy if you tweet URL or notes that you would like to review again at some later date. It really doesn’t matter what you reason for backing up your updates is at least you have a fairly reliable method you can control.

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• Participating in a Twitter Community (blogworld.com)
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• Avatars what you should know part 1 (jafdip.com)
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