I cannot believe this is your shirt. Awesome.

Internet Life, Social Media, Backup and Archiving

Facebook

There is a plugin called “Give Me My Data” which, when installed, can be used to export the wall data from Facebook, along with friend and mutual friend graph information in DOT and XML formats.

Google, g+, gmail, youtube.

One intriguing option is google takeout, which will package up all your metadata into one (or more) files.  In addition, gmail can be archived via POP to local mailclient and then exported to mbox or other. Chrome bookmarks can be exported, Google maps can be exported, etc. Google plus data can be shaped by user-configurable settings.

Data liberation front, nice job!

Tumblr

This one is a bit complicated.There is no tumblr export or backup capability provided by tumblr.com, so instead a variety of other options exist. The most reliable is to import your tumblr blog into WordPress, and then export it from WordPress in an XML form.

To do this, see the tumblr.com post.

After import has completed, all the tumbler posts will be imported into the target wordpress.com blog as individual posts. Some of these posts will have titles, some will have the tumbler post id number as the title. All posts are imported with with visibility set to “Public.” Tags in tumblr posts are converted to wordpress tags, and all tumblr posts will have the initial category of “Uncategorized.”

Apply the following transformations to the imported tumblr posts:

1. Create a new “tumblr” category and tag, and batch process the imported posts categorized as “Uncategorized” with it.

2. Set visibility to “Private” 

3. Turn off comments, pings, etc.

These are all easier if the default 20 posts per page is set to a larger number, ie to 999. To do this, Enter the “Posts” menu, and select the top right “Screen Options” button. Change 20 posts to 100. Technically, one can go up to 999 posts per page, but then the query generated by the large bulk transformations makes hosted wordpress/client browsers fail.YMMV. The 100 to 200 range seems to work well for my situation.

To help organize the imported tumblr posts, I create tags for “tumblr”, “import,” and the name of the tumblr blog imported. A tumblr category is made. Then, these are bulk applied and the posts marked “Private” and categories set to “tumblr.”

The tumblr import is remarkably intact. Tags, posts, titles, etc. Photos, videos are imported (although multi-photo arrangements in tumblr may be imported with different orientation.) I’m starting to like the wordpress archive better than the new tumblr dashboard, to be quite honest.

Adding to the oddity that is import/export from tumblr, see wp2tumblr on github. This was the opposite idea: take wordpress content and then import it into tumblr.

Twitter

Here is a post from twitter about your twitter archive.

WordPress

Sign in to the Dashboard, and go to the “Tools” option on the left menu. Select export. Volia. Easy peasy.

Flirting Through the Ages

First, notes passed in class. Some of these were hilarious, but I’m not going to wax on, in extensive detail, here. There were other forms of written fun: I hand-made you valentines for Valentine Eve @ French Laundry, before it was so, so expensive. (And the rest of the party, just so everybody had a valentine, because I knew you’d like that.)

Second, email. Oh, email. What fun we had. Sometimes I’d want you to go away, just so we could have our fun with email. Sweetest when you were absent, but we’d do it later, even if we were in the same room.

Maybe third, texting. The only reason we got cell phones. Admit it: it was fun. Your only request was an number that ended in zero, and then I got your number plus five. When we told people our numbers this way it sounded strange.

Then social came along and I made up names for Facebook and eventually settled on a strange alias for an imaginary dog that pretended to post about Nick and Nora and all the while, it was you. And me. And you tried Twitter. You won that one, admittedly, and soon emailing links was passée and voilà, I got a twitter account, just to flirt with you.

And now, tumblr.

You cannot escape me. I channel Yves Klein: In the void, full powers.

I pursue.

I pursue.

I pursue.