Unlike the not so wiley Coyote, Martin Hawksey’s coding genius (a) works without anvils falling or explosions and (b) is not focused on bird chasing… well maybe small blue ones.
What started as a cool thing when I got and hung online my twitter archive after seeing that Martin got his, he then put out there what seemed like a dream
@cogdog with you there http://t.co/MraJ6bwO . Getting it to auto update might be my first project
— Martin Hawksey (@mhawksey) January 16, 2013
It took him like 24 hours to build this. See Keep your Twitter Archive fresh on Google Drive using a bit of Google Apps Script.
That’s right, all of thr history of the Twitter archive, but it automatically updates itself! Martin not only figured out how to do that via the Twitter API, but it runs completely in a Google Spreadsheet.
But wait there is nore.
You can store the whole thing on a Google GDrive, so you do not even need a web host to have your own, dynamically updated twitter archive.
Mine is alive and updating at https://googledrive.com/host/0B3J3hv1B8VO1YUdCeHdRd3pBcVk/ Note (August 17, 2016) Google is nuking hosting web content but Martin has an end around — using the gibberish after ./host/ (a folder ID), my archive is now at https://script.google.com/macros/s/AKfycbwrXr8ejYjHwGEO6kj8f4WHIh096ARDRHdNOgAXPqGltoa80FU/exec?folder_id=0B3J3hv1B8VO1YUdCeHdRd3pBcVk (which is now what I point http://tweets.cogdogblog.com to)
UPDATE: August 28, 2016: Scratch that. Martin has doubled his genius card points with his new script that now publishes the archive to GitHub Pages. A rather nice side benefit is that you can (I do) sync that locally using the GitHub desktop app or diving into command line land. I updated mine now hosted at https://cogdog.github.io/tweets and adjusted my domain forwarder to go there too.
Just for grins, I too a screenshot before I ran an update:
I then tweeted:
Thanks to genius of @mhawksey my twitter archive is autoupdating https://t.co/7LExAOFJ This tweet shall soon appear…
— Alan Levine (@cogdog) January 22, 2013
I updated the archive via Martin’s script, and check it out:
Is this not amazing? The Twitter Archive snapshot is updating itself, running in a public spreadsheet on a public drive. All I need to do is update my subdomain tweets.cogdogblog.com so it forwards to that ugly url (why does google make the ugliest freaking URLs?)
Martin’s spreadsheet has a setting to run the updates once a day, so it is fully automated. It even keeps a log of its work:
If you are one of the lucky shmucks like me with a twitter archive, give Martin’s script magic a try. The rest of ya? Keep behind the velvet ropes. And stop drooling in the red carpet.
Martin, you are a generous genius.
Someone call the castle and get this man knighted!
You’re too kind! Behind the scenes there’s some real poetry. Nothing particularly special from me, it was just like GDrive and the Twitter archive just needed an introduction and now they are living together collecting tweets 😉
If you guys were as awesome as you say you are, you’d be calling The Twitter Offices and get me the archive. Until then, you’re a bunch of twitter teases.
I just called them. They said the time zone whiners were low on their priority list. Tough luck.
I do not know why they are rolling it out in such a haphazard and mysterious way. Are there little bird hand packing the archives?
I would be complaining too.
Now stand back from the ropes, willya?