Episode 3: Freedom from Facebook cleverca.st
@cleverdevil I have started listening/following. You have made me discover a (likeable) side to podcasts.
@unoabraham thanks for the kind words! It’s good to know someone is actually listening... and enjoying 😉
@cleverdevil In an episode of Clevercast Jonathan LaCour discusses freeing himself from Facebook by moving all his content from the network, as well as Instagram, to his own website. No small undertaking. He mentions missing some features from Facebook such as the way it surfaces memories - inserting posts from the past into your feed. So, as part of the process he created an "On this day" page which lists all of his content, regardless of type or source, for the current day over the years. It inspired me to do something similar but adding it to /Today rather than as a separate page. I looked to see if there was already a WordPress plugin to add this but, surprisingly, couldn't find one. So I set about writing my own solution. How does it work? To start I get the year of the first post to use as a base and assign this to a variable $count for use later. This is achieved with a post query then looking at the post_date of the oldest post. I could have just manually set this as 2008 but wanted to do it properly in case I reuse the code. Then, for each year between then and last year (inclusive) run a custom query to get posts for the day of the year. The query is contained within a while loop while ($count < $today["year"]) and $count is incremented to stop at the right point. The first time a post is found it displays the "On this day..." toggle but if no posts are found for the day in any year then nothing will be shown at all. The toggle itself is a simple CSS trick using a hidden checkbox which, when checked by tapping on its label, shows the post links by use of the :checked pseudo-class:
otdCheckbox:checked ~ .otdbody {display:block;
}
At the end, if $count == $today["year"] I close out the divs and it's ready. Just 37 lines of code (including whitespace) and a little CSS.
@cleverdevil Perhaps there wasn’t enough of a market before now for WordPress et al. to invest resources into a migration tool/service (there was obviously a desire, because all those tools you strung together), but in the current climate, it does seem like there’s a greater need. Maybe someone is frantically building one right now?
I’d seen several people asking here about getting their photos out of Instagram, so it’s a shame that InstaLooter isn’t non-tech-friendly (or that someone hasn’t deployed it behind a web service on a server somewhere)….
And I like the idea of the “on this day” stuff that you and @colinwalker have built for yourselves. The more pieces of the siloed experience that we can easily replicate on the open web, the better :-)
@smokey I definitely considered building something when I was at DreamHost, but couldn’t get the buy in. Other priorities. I would think WordPress.com and other consumer-focused platforms would be the best to tackle it.
@smokey a few years ago I made a service "Flickstagram" which would migrate all your Instagram photos to your Flickr. I'm tempted to do something similar again, except it imports everything to your micro.blog or Wordpress or other Micropub website
@cleverdevil I wondered if you might have entertained that idea there. I concur that and it's more up the alley of a consumer-focused platform, but I can also see it as a selling point/differentiator for certain hosting providers that want to compete with WordPress.com.
@aaronpk Neat! I don't know what the people I saw asking here ended up doing; I think one was going to resort to taking screenshots before I suggested getting the image URL from one of the metas, but that's still a lot of manual work (and doesn't account for "new" features like videos and galleries).