I wanted to import a bunch of tweets from my archive (mostly cat photos and a few other bits) but I didn't want to have to manually go through each tweet, copy the text and download the photos. So I wrote a script to do it for me once I had the IDs (which I got with my Safari shortcut).

One thing that had annoyed me for a while is I didn't keep a diary/note of things that happened and my thoughts during the first year of so of the pandemic but thanks to going through my archive I now have that. On a cheerier note I have a lovely collection of animals in the pets category. These additional categories were done manually (with the help of QLMarkdown) as I couldn't think of a way to automate this.

Once I had the IDs it was a case of getting the format correctly (for example, Micro.blog will fail an import with empty categories in the YAML). I was able to take ~450 tweets, convert them to markdown and import them into Micro.blog. For example, this tweet:

becomes:

---
date: 2022-10-20T13:56:19+00:00
categories: Imported Tweets
---

"You could not live with your own failure. Where did that bring you? Back to me"

![](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ffg6jkDXkAARD4p.jpg)

The script isn't perfect. It doesn't do anything with hashtags or usernames, nor does it check if a tweet is a reply or a retweet. The project readme.md has steps for using it on your own archive.