Tag: archive

This account doesn’t exist

Twitter Account Deleted

As you can see from the image above, I am no longer on Twitter/X. 

In actuality, I’ve eschewed the dumpster fire that is Twitter/X since Elon Musk acquired it in 2022. But I decided that 2025 is going to be a year of simplification – deleting, tidying and streamlining. If it’s not needed, get rid of it. If it needs doing, just do it.

With this in mind, I deleted my Twitter/X account in January.

And a couple of weeks ago, I finally worked through the coding to make the archive plugin 1 on this blog work the way that I want it to. The archive page is back to only displaying posts and not status updates. 

Next up on the list is to archive/flatten the blog I used for my Masters dissertation project. There’s no need for me to be maintaining the themes and plugins when it will never be used again. 

  1. The archive plugin I had used for a long time was not being updated and had become incompatible with the version of PHP I was running on my domain. The best replacement I could find required a bit more knowledge of HTML and PHP to make it work the way I wanted it to. [↩]

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? 🤔

Hello World! Again.

Like all the cool kids seem to have done, I have added an archive of my tweets at twitter.jamesmichie.com. I have not decided if I am going to delete all my tweets, but as you will see, I have been pretty close to inactive for some time.

Nor have I found an alternative social network to engage in. I had a brief dalliance with Mastodon but I was not enamoured with the format (in essence a distributed clone of Twitter) – unsure as to whether I could, or even wanted to, rebuild a close network of peers.

In fact, I am not sure that I need social media as it currently exists. I do not believe that I have missed anything over the last year or so by not being active on Twitter. Quite the contrary. I have read more books and actual news. I have grown a cultivated list of blogs in varying genres to read via RSS (yes that old chestnut). And I have focussed on my health and fitness (running has taken over my life!)

However, I signed up to Micro.blog, today, in the hopes that it encourages me to post more regularly in a shorter format. Sharing is important (IMO) and I feel there is space (once again) for writing to be a positive outlet for me. Micro.blog allows for self-hosting, via WordPress and other open source blogging platforms, which means that I will retain ownership of my data. It also offers a growing network and native MAC and iOS apps.

I hope the shorter, low-stakes format of micro-blog encourages me to post briefly and regularly. 

We will see… I have promised a return to regular posting in the past and it didn’t happen. However, it’s been nearly two years since I wrote here, and a year since I engaged with Twitter in any meaningful way. A lot has happened and some of it is worth putting out into the world.