Ever thought to yourself that you wish there was some way you could take a look back and see what you tweeted around this time last year?
Or perhaps you remember that time you tweeted about that hilarious viral video, and now you can’t find it?
By installing Tweet Nest on your own web server, now you can! Features include:
Archive- Use Tweet Nest to easily store, browse and search amongst your tweets to find exactly what you're looking for, and let others do the same. New-style retweets, geographic places and links to original tweets included.
- Backup
- Additionally, Tweet Nest serves as a backup of your precious tweets on your own server. Tweets that might grow too old to be retrieved from Twitter.com will not fade out here, allowing you to go back in time as much as possible.
- Media
- Tweet Nest offers an easier way of viewing your tweets at a glance, as they include thumbnails of media like photos hosted on common providers, such as TwitPic. Additionally, for every month view you get an elegant yet simple bar chart of the amount of tweets, retweets and replies you've sent every day.
- Customize!
- Tweet Nest is something you host on your own server, so if you know your web development awesomesauce, you can make your tweet archive your own by easily changing color values in the config file, or even changing the behaviour of the whole thing by changing the stylesheet or some of the other code if you so wish.
Looking for a demo? Check out my own tweet archive, which I’ve customized with my own background image and color scheme.
Installation
Tweet Nest is programmed in PHP and requires a MySQL database to work. It’s been tested in LAMP environments, i.e. Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP. It may work on other types of servers, but you’ll have to figure that out for yourself. The minimum requirements of Tweet Nest are:
- PHP 5.2 or higher with cURL enabled (or 5.1 with the PECL JSON module installed in addition)
- MySQL 5.0 or higher
You can check out what versions you have by asking your web host.
When you’re confident that your server fulfills the above requirements, click the button below to download a zip archive, and then read on.
Download Tweet Nest Version 0.8.3 BETA, 98KB
Then it’s time to upload it to your server. All files need to be uploaded in the folder hierarchy found in the zip file. Specifically, included are two so-called .htaccess files, one directly in the folder and one in the maintenance folder. If you don’t see those on your server after uploading, you need to rename the RENAME-ME.htaccess files in these two places to .htaccess each.
If you do already see the .htaccess files, you can delete the RENAME-ME files. They’re not needed.
You can now run the built-in set-up guide where you can enter your configuration information. This page works mostly like any other installable web app, and it should hopefully be easy for you to fill it out. However, you may run into one or two errors. Not every error can be fixed, but those that can will be explained here:
If it tells you that your config file is not writable, you have to make sure the server can write to the inc/config.phpfile. This is usually done by temporarily giving every user on the server write privileges to that file. On Linux servers, this is displayed asrw-rw-rw-or0666. You can usually do this through your FTP app by right clicking and choosing “Properties” or “Get Info”. And once you’re done with the set up, you need to set your config file back to normal privileges. On a Linux server, this is usuallyrw-r--r--or0644.- If you get a MySQL access denied error, you’ve probably misspelt your database info.
- If you get a blank page or a lot of syntax errors, you are probably running a PHP version less than 5.1, which this web app requires.
Great! Now that you’re done with the setting up, there’s a couple of things that need done. You are told this by the set-up guide, but what is most important is the following: You have to load in your user data and tweets. This is done by pointing your browser at two maintenance pages that spend some time loading in the aforementioned. If you set an admin password in the set-up guide, you’ll have to use it here, along with your Twitter screen name. The two files are:
maintenance/loaduser.php— This one loads in your user information from Twitter: For example, this is real name, your icon, your location and more. This’ll need to be loaded in at least once, when you’re setting up Tweet Nest, but will also need to be loaded once you change icon or anything else like that.maintenance/loadtweets.php— This is the important one: By running this file, you load in your tweets to the archive. If there’s no tweets in the archive, it loads all of them, but if there are, it loads everything new since the last one archived. In other words, this needs to be run often if you want to keep your archive up to date.
An optional step to keep your archive up to date is to run loadtweets.php automatically in a cron job every day. When you run it through your browser, it displays at the bottom of the page a command you might use to run that script in the terminal of your server. Double-check that it works by trying it out, and then add it as a daily or hourly cron job (see the Wikipedia article for help).
That’s it! It should now be fully functional on your site. If you want to customize it further, read on. If it still doesn’t work, head over to our support forum. And if you’ve got questions, be sure to check out the Tweet Nest FAQ first.
Upgrading
If you want to upgrade from an older version to the newest version, it’s as easy as this:
- Replace all files in the root folder, the
extensions/,inc/andmaintenance/folders with the new files, while keeping your old and customizedinc/config.phpfile. - Run
upgrade.phpin your browser. - Delete
upgrade.php. - Done!
If you want to add support for new image services that have been added in some (but not all) newer versions to older tweets, you have to clear your database and reload all tweets again after having done the above.
If you run into troubles upgrading, head over to our support forum.
Customization
Tweet Nest is all about customization! I don’t want this to be the sort of factory thing that everyone has installed and every instance of it looks the same as everywhere else, I want people to customize it and make it their own! And so, for starters, it’s very easy to make some defining colour changes that make your tweet archive unique.
If you open up inc/config.php in any raw text editor like Notepad, you will find a Style section below your configuration information. This is where almost all of the colours used in the Tweet Nest interface are defined. If you want to change any of them, simply give it a go and save & reupload the file and you’ll see the changes instantly. All colour values can be given values that can be found in any CSS file, such as #fff, rgb(255, 255, 255) or white.
However, a couple of colours are equivalent to those found on your Twitter profile and thus you can simply set that colour value to profile, and it’ll be the same as the equivalent on your Twitter profile! (If this is outdated, run maintenance/loaduser.php.) Not every value works like this, but those that do are clearly marked in the config file.
Of course, if you want more power, you can also change the CSS file directly or even create your own and link to it in the config. These can even be repackaged for other people to use.
Even more advanced, there is also rudimentary support for extensions which empower Tweet Nest to do more cool stuff. They can bind to different types of hooks in the Tweet Nest app and thus perform actions when those hooks are reached. Right now, there’s only enhanceTweet (do stuff to tweet while it is being loaded) and displayTweet (do stuff to tweet before it’s being displayed), but more might come in a subsequent version if you ask me. There’s no further documentation on this, but look at the one extension made, found in extensions/images.php to see how one is built.
If you end up customizing your installation of Tweet Nest, send a link to me! I want to see!
Oh, and by the way: Tweet Nest is on GitHub — and it’s open source, naturally.
Who made this?
My name is Andy Graulund, and I’m a guy who lives in Copenhagen, Denmark. My Twitter screen name is @graulund, and you can follow me on Twitter for updates to this script and other cool stuff.
I have a weblog called Pongsocket and also an empty personal website.
I also recently created Like it? Tweet it!, a widget that allows people to tweet about your content directly from your site.