ℹ️ Importing tweets

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Micro.blog can import an archive of your tweets. You get this archive as a .zip file from Twitter, under your Twitter account settings.

To import this archive into Micro.blog, click on Posts → “…” → Import. For large archives that contain photos, it may take a while to process the upload because Micro.blog copies the photos to store them with your blog.

There are a few unique twists with how this works:

  • When you import your tweets, we create a new blog in your Micro.blog account just for the tweets. This is in the format username-tweets.micro.blog. There’s no extra charge for this blog.
  • This new blog stores all your tweets as blog posts. Micro.blog also copies any photos in tweets to this tweets blog.
  • A new plug-in is installed that links your existing blog with the tweets blog. This plug-in provides a streamlined interface for browsing tweets by month or searching across all your tweets.

You can see an example of this on Manton’s blog here: manton.org/tweets

Structuring the tweet storage this way means we can leverage many of the powerful features built in to Micro.blog:

  • There’s a new API that the plug-in uses. You can make your own version of the plug-in from GitHub by copying its HTML and JavaScript. You can even access the API of tweets from apps and blogs outside of Micro.blog.
  • The separate tweets blog is a full Micro.blog-hosted blog so you can use custom Hugo templates to make your own web interface for browsing tweets, or add your own domain name to it.
  • If you have multiple Twitter accounts, you can create additional blogs for those accounts. The trick is to name the blog with a “-tweets” suffix. (We only include one extra tweets blog for free. The rest will be added to your subscription just like any additional blog.)

Micro.blog imports tweets from the .zip archive of tweets you can download from Twitter. Micro.blog specifically looks for the following files and folders inside the .zip file:

  data/tweets.js
  data/account.js
  data/tweets_media

If you unzip the file, you can save upload time by removing the videos and other files that Micro.blog ignores, although that’s not required.

A couple limitations to keep in mind:

  • Tweets are public. If you had a protected Twitter account with any tweets that you do not want to be visible on the web, please do not use this feature.
  • Micro.blog will ignore any media in a tweets archive except what Twitter classifies as a “photo”. For videos, screenshots, and other media items, the imported tweet will still contain a URL back to Twitter for that media.
  • Twitter has changed their archive format over the years. Micro.blog needs a recent archive. Older archives may not be processed correctly.

If you have many photos or videos in your .zip archive, you can speed up the upload by un-zipping the archive and removing the videos. Then re-zip the file to upload it.

Because the tweets storage is separate from embedding tweets on your blog, you can add the interface for browsing tweets to any blog, even hosted outside of Micro.blog.

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