Hosting and Impermanence

I linked to my boys' old blog today when Christopher asked for an April Fools prank idea, and noticed that the images were missing. This is due to the demise of iDisk, Apple's handy built-in version of DropBox that I paid them about $100/year for until they shut it down and broke all my links to it.

To fix this, I copied the old iDisk Sites folder to Google Drive, and manually changed the links in the blog posts. Then I had a thought - could I host my twitter archive this way? As you can see it works.

Here's how to do it:

1. Download your Twitter Archive by clicking Request your archive on the Account Settings page.
2. Install Google Drive
3. Expand the archive and copy it into the local Google Drive folder
4. Go to Google Drive in the browser, and set the folder to public using the Share button.
5. Copy the URL which will be something like: https://drive.google.com/#folders/0B7cAS_dEul22V3d5c0d5WkpEOFE
6. Edit the first part to be 'googledrive.com/host' so you get https://googledrive.com/host/0B7cAS_dEul22V3d5c0d5WkpEOFE
7. (Optional) Go over to a URL shortener and make a short link for it like I did http://j.mp/kmtweets

Now you have your old tweets hosted on Google. Tweet a link to them.

Aha, I can just drag my Twitter archive onto Google Drive and publish it j.mp/kmtweets

— Kevin Marks (@kevinmarks) April 2, 2013