Trying to get control of my data

The services I use on a daily basis seem to take control of my data. They decide what I can access and what gets hidden/archived. In an attempt to get control of my data maintained by such services on the Web, I decided to start adding extensions to my blog engine. Starting today, a “daily notes” blog entry will be added automatically. To begin with, the post will only contain a day’s Twitter entries but, over time, I hope to aggregate other information as well (e.g. favorite links, visited pages, etc.).

With this change, my blog database becomes the archive of my Web-related activity (or, at least that’s the plan). I am starting with the archival of my tweets so I don’t lose them if anything happens to twitter. The next data island to attack is Facebook but that’s a huge beast! I don’t know how to do it yet. I am still monitoring the data portability effort to see if anything comes out of it.

I got the idea after talking with Jim Downing some time ago. I know that others put summary entries as well. Expect problems with the new feature. I am still developing as I get coding break from book-related writing.

So, to start with, here are the last 20 tweets (there are no dates in this initial list)…

Twitter

• 4:44 PM: Back from 3 excellent days in Vancouver. Hyatt… what a rip off… $38/night for parking? Theoni and Simran are now married. Love you guys!
• 12:44 AM: Wow… I am discovering the wonders of Priceline’s “name your price”. $80/night for a 4star hotel in downtown Vancouver.
• 4:10 PM: Back home… 2am… House music. Dancing! Another fab night. MANY THANKS TO EVERYONE FOR THEIR WISHES. I am moved. Love you all!
• 10:32 PM: Ha ha ha! I did Karaoke… “Beds are burning” by Midnight Oil. It was fun. B4 that, we had an excellent dinner at Wild Ginger. Great night.
• 7:53 AM: Grrr! Another “overdraft fee” from Wells Fargo. This time I complained and it got reversed. It was not my fault. Time to change lender!
• 1:58 PM: Had fun square dancing tonight :-)))
• 11:00 PM: Weekend in SF was a lot of fun! Back to work now for few days before heading up north.
• 1:57 PM: Meropi is here and it’s fun! In San Francisco tomorrow for the weekend.
• 7:48 AM: @jimwebber I didn’t have the CD and a new special edition came out. BTW… We must resync our libraries. Must set up rsync on my storage!
• 6:06 AM: New CDs in my collection: U2 (new), Chemical Brothers (Brotherhood), Prodigy (invaders must die), Fat Boy Slim (a rare mix), Pearl Jam (ten)
• 11:48 PM: hey @jimwebber…. am i to blame for endnote as well? 🙂 Interesting that your wife uses papers. @ldirks should pay attention 🙂
• 9:10 AM: so…. brochitis with a possibility of pneumonia. Nice! There goes the plan for the half marathon in Vancouver 🙁
• 12:59 PM: This is going to be interesting… I m hallucinating due to the effects of my bad cold but still… just filed my tax return form :-)))
• 11:28 AM: hmmm…. end of the wknd. Not feeling so great again. I was almost fine at lunchtime. Going to the doctor tomorrow.
• 6:33 AM: 48 hours in bed; 6lbs lost; no voice left… but I feel better today :-))) the fever is gone; the sun is out; taking it easy this wknd 🙂
• 9:26 AM: being sick sucks. This weekend was supposed to be all about skiing 🙁 At least I’ll make lots of progess on the Web book.
• 7:29 AM: sick at home 🙁
• 4:00 AM: welcome @ldirks to tweeting.
• 6:39 AM: doh! Stupid March with the 5 Mondays… resulted in 3 mortgage payments… $35 fee -( The automatic deposit was scheduled for one day late.
• 4:05 AM: thanks for the link @jimdowning