I’ve been using Twitter since 2008, and for reasons I’ll explain, I’ve been pulling each and every one of those tweets into this site as an individual post (as a Custom Post Type of course). Over the years, I’ve tweeted less and less, and find the value of keeping all the tweets less important than the effort to maintain them. Nearly 6000 tweets clogging up the WordPress database. A few times a week the site would bog down enough to trigger an uptime monitor, and I’m certain it’s all the tweets. So it’s time to say Goodbye Sweet Tweets. Oh, and also Instagram.

Why keep all the tweets?

What was the point of keeping them? Good question. The quick and dirty answer is that I did, and still do, believe in independent publishing – of owning your own content. Those 140 (I mean 280) missives we’re mine, dammit, and I was going to keep them. If Twitter went away, my tweets would still be mine.

Okay so why kill them now?

Right… why now? Besides the site slowdowns, I’ve really just not cared too much to keep them. When will I ever go back and read ANY of them? What value do they have being online and available? The only audience these tweets have are spam bots, which, you know, suck. So the time has come to let them all go.

Thanks to Ozh

Huge thanks to Ozh, and his script for importing tweets. He’s still importing, and you can see the feed right here.

What about that backup I see there in your hands

Good eye there, you. Yeah I’ve got a backup, what you think? Maybe they’ll live again one day.