Category: Technology

Twitter –> Markdown FTW!

Thanks to Jim Groom for sharing this post by Matthias Ott, my Twitter archive has now been converted from HTML to Markdown .

To do this, there is a Python script, created by Tim Hutton. As Matthias explains:

  • It converts the tweets in your archive to markdown with embedded images, videos and links.
  • It replaces t.co URLs with their original versions.
  • It copies used images to an output folder, to allow them to be moved to a new home.

I don’t know if I want to host my Twitter archive anywhere but having run the parser I know that it is now future-proof and far more portable, should I decide to host it publicly in the future. It is, after all, a significant part of my digital footprint from the last 13 years and nine months.

If you haven’t taken a copy of your Twitter archive yet, I recommend that you do. And if you do have a copy of your archive, it is definitely worth converting it into a more friendly format.

Now I just need to decide if I want to nuke my Twitter account completely? 🤔

Deleted Google Chrome from my MacBook and iPhone because Chrome is bad!

Returned to using Firefox as my second (work((I use different browsers for personal use and work – keeping them in separate buckets. 🪣))) browser.

Safari reigns supreme as my default browser. It is native, lightning-fast and the built in reading list feature is more than ‘enough’ – no plugins required.

Do Not Track

Over the last four years, I have worked hard to make my blog as light, secure and privacy conscious as possible. ‘Https’ is forced across my entire domain; it is hosted on a European server; uses no analytics (Google and/or Jetpack); and the least amount of plugins((Currently seven; four of which are helping to keep different aspects of my blog secure.)) possible.

When visiting my blog you should find that it is fast and, most importantly, not tracking you.

This is true most of the time but there are some exceptions where content has been embedded from external sites. The list of offenders is small (YouTube, Twitter, Instagram) but I am not happy that their presence allows them to intrude on my readers’ privacy none the less. It also meant, arguably, that I was not fully GDPR compliant.

Doing some research into this issue, I came across a post by Dries Buytaert discussing the ‘cookies’ that are installed from embedded YouTube videos. He discovered that YouTube provides a privacy-enhanced way to embed videos on your blog without leaving a cookie. Instead of using youtube.com you can use youtube-nocookie.com instead.

I finally got round to putting this into practice and spent a couple of hours this morning editing all of the YouTube videos embedded on my blog to use the following code:

<iframe src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/video-id" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe>

Testing a post in Safari, it is clear that it has worked correctly. The YouTube video is embedded and plays as expected but no trackers were contacted.

No Trackers

While doing this, I also found a number of broken links and some embedded audio files that were no longer working. I fixed those along the way, making for a very productive morning. Winning! 😃

The next step is to see if I can achieve the same with the handful of tweets and Instagram posts that I have embedded on my blog.

Scratching an itch…

I have long admired the way some bloggers are able to include an image when auto-posting to Twitter. Looking at the IFTTT applet I was using to auto-post from my own blog, there did not appear to be an option to do this, and a web search did not yield any useful results.

I turned to Twitter and asked Warren Ellis what service or plugin he uses((I subsequently found out that Warren uses the Jetpack plugin. However, he has recently written in his newsletter about issues he has had with this feature not working correctly. And I do believe he has since found a solution.)). Having asked the question, I received a couple of suggestions from Doug Belshaw:

Looking into both of these I could see that they would achieve what I wanted but I was not satisfied with either implementation. Blog2Social requires you to create a Twitter application. This is not a big deal (I’ve done it before) but I did not believe this was necessary to achieve my goal. Furthermore, it is heavy-handed on the promotion of its paid features in the WordPress backend. The other option, Jetpack, is too feature rich and its footprint on the back end of your blog is quite intrusive. Furthermore, to access all of the auto-tweet features a paid plan is required. This does not sit right with me given the open source origins of WordPress.

Returning to IFTTT, I could not shake off the feeling that there was a way to do it. The search function in IFTTT is a bit hit and miss with a high noise to signal ratio. However, there were several recipes that indicated images could be posted natively to Twitter from other sources. This lead to me taking a fresh look at the Twitter channel in IFTTT. I saw that they have added a range of options and this indeed included the option to tweet with an image.

So, to relieve the proverbial itch, I started from scratch (😉) and created a new applet to share my WordPress posts to Twitter with an image.

dr amp shovel

This was a definite case that proved it is always worth digging a little deeper! Dr. Amp would approve.