Tag: LinkedIn

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I checked out what you get when you export your content from Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, WordPress and LiveJournal, with an eye for both private archives and migrating to your own site.

Tired of Twitter? Fed up with Facebook? Irritated by Instagram?

If you want to leave a major social network, but keep your content — or even just make sure you have your own backup in case the site shuts down, purges accounts, or changes its TOS *cough* LiveJournal *cough*, you can usually get some of your info. But not all of them give it to you in a way that’s useful.

Twitter

You get a CSV spreadsheet containing all your tweets since the dawn of Twitter, with the text in one column, ID in another, timestamp, reply-to, and so on. It’s pretty easy to import this into another system. (I pulled mine into a test WordPress site using the WP All-Import plugin.)

Links in the text appear as the t.co shortened URL, with the “real” URL in another column. Of course, if the “real” URL was also a shortener, you’ll just see bit.ly or whatever. And if you’ve been on Twitter long enough, you may find that some of your older links use shorteners that don’t exist anymore (or have purged their archives), like ping.fm or tr.im.

You also get an offline web app with an index.html that allows you to view all your tweets month by month without visiting the site.

But you don’t get any of your uploaded media, or direct messages. So if you mostly use Twitter for text-based microblogging, you’re fine, but if you use it for photo sharing or private conversations, you’re out of luck.

Update: Retweets are sometimes incomplete in the spreadsheet. The text field is a constructed manual retweet — “RT @otheruser: Text of the original tweet” — but it’s truncated to fit in 140 characters (even if the original was made after the 280-character update). So if adding the username pushes it over the limit, or if it was longer to begin with, you don’t actually get the entire original tweet in the spreadsheet. I suspect this means retweets don’t actually use that field, and get the content straight from the original tweet by ID.

Facebook

You get all your photos, videos and messages, organized by folders, but the names are all just numeric IDs. You do get an offline web application that includes names and indexes.

It also has your entire timeline in one giant HTML file. But it only includes the text, the type of update, and the timestamps. If you posted a link, it doesn’t include the link. If you posted a photo, it doesn’t link to the photo.

And you don’t get comments, either your comments on other people’s posts, or their comments on yours.

Worst, though? It doesn’t indicate the privacy of each post. That means you can’t take the timeline and import it to a new system unless you separate the public and private posts one by one.

Update March 2018: Apparently if you use the Facebook Messenger app on Android, there’s a good chance Facebook also has your SMS messages and call history. This is probably not something you expected them to have.

Google Plus

Google Takeout allows you to export various categories of data, including your Google+ stream, circles, +1s and page posts.

Each post is exported as a separate HTML file, named after the first line. Comment threads are included, along with timestamps, a permalink to the original post, and a visibility indicator. It only marks Public vs. Limited, but that’s better than you get from Facebook.

The HTML files are suitable for publishing as-is, and marked up so that that it shouldn’t be hard to write an import tool for a CMS. (I’m planning on writing a script to convert them to WordPress’ XML format.)

Images aren’t included in the G+ stream download, and are instead hotlinked on photo posts and galleries. I haven’t checked, but I suspect any images you uploaded to Google+ will be included in your Google Photos download.

There is an index of all your posts…but it’s in alphabetical order.

Bonus: Google Buzz

When Google shut down Buzz a few years ago, they generated archives and put them in each person’s Drive account. They did one cool thing, which was to create two sets of archives: One complete, the other containing only public posts.

The format? Long PDFs, dozens of pages each, with all your posts, labeled by source (Buzz, Twitter, a specific site, etc.)…with the letters scrambled. Apparently they left the “reduce file size” option turned on when they generated them. This means you can’t copy/paste or search in the PDF itself, but you can open it in Google Docs and it’ll convert the text back, at which point you can do both. But that doesn’t preserve links or media, which you have to get out of the original PDF…

LinkedIn

LinkedIn generates two phases of archives. The first one, available within minutes of requesting it, contains your profile info, your messages, contacts and invitations in CSV files.

The complete archive, available within 24 hours, actually lives up to the name. Everything is in a set of CSV files: Your contacts, your shares, your group posts, your group comments, even your behind the scenes info like ad targeting categories and recent login records. (One word of warning: They’re encoded as UTF-16, so if the tool you use to import afterward isn’t expecting that, you may need to convert it.)

I’m not sure how photos and video are handled, as I’ve never uploaded either to LinkedIn (other than my profile picture, which landed in a folder called Media Files).

LiveJournal

LiveJournal’s own export tool will export a month at a time into a CSV or XML file, which includes your posts and their metadata (timestamps, moods, etc.), but not comments, userpics or photos.

There are other tools available using the API, which might be able to get more data. I’ve looked at two:

The WordPress importer will pull in all your posts, and the comments on them, and makes a note of moods, music, etc. (you can use my LJ-Moods plugin to display them). It doesn’t transfer any images you’ve uploaded.

DreamWidth’s importer seems more complete – LJ and Dreamwidth are based on the same code, after all – and is able to natively handle moods, userpics, etc. But it doesn’t transfer your media library either.

WordPress

WordPress exports a giant XML file containing all your posts, their comments, and their metadata. You can import it into another WordPress instance, and have virtually the same blog. Or you can merge two blogs together by importing both. (I’ve moved posts with comment threads from one blog to another by putting them in a category, exporting the category, and then importing them on the new blog.)

It doesn’t include your media library, but if you import the file to a new site before closing down the old one, the importer should offer to pull in all of the images and other media that are actually used in posts.

Plus on a self-hosted site you have a lot of tools available: backup plugins that will include everything, SFTP access through your web host, etc.

Update: Tumblr

I didn’t initially include Tumblr because it doesn’t have an exporter…but WordPress has an importer that does a good job of transferring your blog directly from Tumblr to a WordPress blog. (Look on your WordPress dashboard under Tools/Import.) It even imports images (though sometimes it imports a single-image post as a gallery for some reason). The original URL is stored in a custom field, and you can leave it connected and import new items when you want to bring them in.

Some gotchas: It can only map to one author, but you get to choose which one. It puts everything in the default category. Videos don’t get imported, even if you’ve just embedded a YouTube video.

Update: Mastodon

With the 2.3.0 update (March 2018), Mastodon has added its first archive tool. It’s essentially complete, but it’s only machine-readable so far. You get a pair of files in ActivityPub format (based on JSON), one containing your profile and one containing your formatted posts. You also get a folder structure containing any images and videos you’ve uploaded, and your icon and header image.

If you’re willing to slog through the JSON files, you can figure out which image goes to which post, but it’s still a pain.

But this is a first pass, aimed more at portability (keep your own backups or move your data to another instance or service) than readability. ActivityPub is a new standard, so there aren’t many converters yet, but that’s likely to improve.

Others

Instagram doesn’t have an export tool, so you have to rely on third-party solutions.

Flickr allows you to bulk-download photos from your Camera Roll, and it helpfully uses the title to name the files, but it doesn’t export the description, tags, or comments.

Mastodon currently only lets you export your contacts and block lists, but archiving and migration (from one Mastodon instance to another) are on the roadmap.

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The Social Homes plugin for WordPress displays a list of icons linking to your various social networking profiles* as a sidebar widget. When you update your list of sites, it calls out and automatically detects the location of each icon.

Unfortunately, the detection doesn’t work on LinkedIn, leaving your blog with a broken image, empty square or text label, depending on the visitor’s web browser. The plugin developer is aware of the issue, but several months have gone by with no fix.

So I’ve fixed it. Here’s how you can fix it on your blog.

Technical Details

First, some background. The problem is that Social Homes is expecting to see this pattern:

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="/path-to-icon">

But LinkedIn is using this equally valid pattern:

<link href="/path-to-icon" rel="shortcut icon">

This would be okay if it simply failed to find the icon, because it would fall back to /favicon.ico … which happens to be correct for LinkedIn. Instead it’s skipping past the end of the tag and picking up the next reference, which is currently a stylesheet.

The Fix

The simplest fix** is to just make sure it stops at the end of the tag, and let it fall back to favicon.ico.

Here’s what to do. Open up social-homes.php and look for the section titled, “Social Homes service parser.” The function you want is called widget_socialhomes_parse_service

Look for the section labeled, “grab the favicon” and find these two lines:

$tmpIcon1 = split('"shortcut icon"', $contents);
$tmpIcon2 = split('href="', $tmpIcon1[0]);

Add the middle line below, and change tmpIcon1[1] to tmpIcon1a[1] in what’s now the third line:

$tmpIcon1 = split('"shortcut icon"', $contents);
$tmpIcon1a = split('>', $tmpIcon1[1]);
$tmpIcon2 = split('href="', $tmpIcon1a[0]);

That’s it! All you have to do now is go back into your Widgets config, open up the Social Homes widget, and re-save it!

*Technically, you can link to any website, whether it’s a social networking profile or not, but that’s the original intent.

**A more proper fix would be to change the way Social Homes looks for the icon so that it doesn’t depend on the link attributes being in the same order, but this is a simpler change.