People start a new year with good resolutions, many of which are not kept. So it is time to finally fulfill one of mine for 2023. That is leaving Twitter. In November 2022, I already opened a new Mastodon account. On Twitter I was only referencing my posts there. But I never got around to officially closing my Twitter account, just because I wanted to keep my timeline there. Now, finally, I downloaded my tweet archive and converted it to a presentable form using Tim Huttons Twitter Archive Parser.
How to embed your Archive
In case you also want to leave Twitter for good, here is what I did in order to preserve my posts. First, you need to request your archive as described here. You will receive an email notice after a day or so that your archive is ready for download. This is a nicely layed-out web page containing not only your old tweets, but also some statistical data. However, all your links are still in the Twitter-style short notation using t.co, meaning that they are not directly accessible. Likewise, your images are accessed via the Twitter page. Once you delete your account, these are probably gone.
Your next step is therefore to convert this archive, get the correct links back and download the high-res images. I found out how to easily do this via a post by Matthias Ott, linking to the archive parser mentioned above. You can now upload this archive data to your own web server and make it available as below. In order to embed the pages in WordPress, I am using an iFrame plugin. Now have fun browsing my old archive!
Twitter Archive
This is my whole Twitter archive in chronological order, with a total of 105 tweets.