Twitterscribe - Keeping your tweets preserved.

First off, thankyou ever so much for signing up to this crazy ride. I couldn't have done it without you. Well, I could've, but it would have been kinda pointless. So thankyou for signing up, and sitting back letting your tweets roll in to my database. Our database.

Now I'd like to address one thing that you're probably all thinking:

Yes, there are so many things left to do and I don't have enough time and also I kind of made it hard for myself.

I've been developing the site in Python as a nice little project to pick up more of the language, as I'm usually a PHP guy. But that means it's harder to just knock out updates. Also not helpful is the fact that I sort of screwed up my local dev version (long story), and I will probably have to rebuild it. So I've been putting that off, which means you guys haven't had any new Twitterscribe goodness. Sorry.

But! When I do get the ball rolling again, there's plenty to add...

Things that will almost certainly go in

There are all sorts of things that should be in there. Some are easy, others less so. Here's a list, in probable chronological order:

• Fixed dates on export: At the moment all dates are GMT. I am storing your timezones, though, so it's just a matter of applying the difference to the times and bingo, your tweets will be on time.
• Favourites: As requested, I'll download and store your favourites so you can have them forever too.
• Blog: So I can write this sort of stuff on the site and not spam you guys.
• OAuth: Eventually I won't need your password, Twitter will just ask you if you want to grant me permission to take your tweets. This is A Good Idea so it's definitely going to happen as soon as is feasible.
• New interface: The interface is kind of crap for actually doing stuff. I plan to rectify this. Everything will be jigged so that things make more sense, and there's more room for future bits and pieces.
• Manual imports from the past: Currently when you sign up, I attempt to import your last 1000 tweets. This is fine if you have less than that amount, but if you have more you'd be understandably sad you couldn't get them into the system. I'm going to add functionality that lets you (one-off) import as far back as Twitter allows, so that everything gets in that can.
• Close my account: I don't have any way to delete an account at the moment except manually. Hopefully this isn't something people are hanging out for.
• PDFs! Because the whole aim of this game was to get you some really pretty output. Everyone else does graphs, charts, word clouds, whatever – but here we're all about the tweets. As soon as everything else is up to scratch I'll start writing some nice PDF templates so you can download, print, and love everything that you wrote.
• Then books! Once PDFs are mastered, it's a hop, skip and a jump to lulu.com to get some custom books printed from them (and they're actually pretty cheap). This is the cool bit. A paperback of your own tweets! With your name and maybe some Twitpics on the cover! The excitement is palpable.

Things that might go in but are a tiny indistinct speck on the horizon right now

Keep in mind that there's plenty of space in here for anything you, my friend, might come up with. If you have ideas please whisper them in my ear.

• Twitpic integration: So your pics get PDFed along with your tweets.
• Other integration: Blog posts? Last.fm? It would be kind of cool to have a book that combined all of your "life streams" into one diary-type thing. A diary for the modern age.
• Who favourited your tweets: Something similar to favotter.matope.com that shows who favourited a particular tweet beside it. This is kind of tricky to do (and I'm not quite sure how they do it besides grabbing the public timeline constantly) so it's a maybe.