grtnr.com

sociolog - Your trail across social media

04 Jan 2016

I write or blog in different media:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • A private blog with restricted access (because it contains family pictures)
  • This blog

From time to time I find it nice to scroll through my past. I do this most often on our family blog, because it contains the most interesting content and because it is easy to scroll through. I would like to be able to scroll through all my past across all media.

So this is what my software should do:

  • Collect all entries I wrote in the social media:
    • Twitter
    • Facebook
    • Wordpress
  • Create one document per entry in a Github Repo
  • Handle properly duplicate content: Since some years my Twitter account is linked to my Facebook account in that Twitter entries are replicated to Facebook. That’s because I have people that I consider audience in both media.
  • Collect also the feedback to my posts
  • Nicely display them in a static way, including overview pages

Some technical thoughts:

  • I would write it in java because that’s what I know best
  • Would be a headless program i.e. no UI
  • Input should be the date of the last recorded social media entry
  • It collects all the entries (including the comments to it) on the different social media channels since that date
  • It dedupes them (i.e. merges the ones that are the same or replicates of one another on different channels)
  • It creates one document / file per social media entry and writes them in an output directory
  • This directory is then replicated / added to a github account
  • Social media entry documents would be named like 2015-12-03-The_title_of_what_ I_wrote-TWITTER.json
  • There would be a header file with a fixed name, i.e. sociologs.json. This file would hold the first 20 logs and point to a file with the next logs.
  • The domain sociolog.io would be available - as of today, Jan 4 2016.
  • The generated index.html would load the data via JS/AJAX requests and continue loading while the user scrolls down

If anyone is interested, or has comment, please get in touch at tilldotgartneratgmaildotcom.