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Petar G. Petrov
Petar G. Petrov

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Help Me Delete Your Tweets!

Ok, I do apologize for the clickbaity title and to make up for it here's what this is all about in brief.

tl;dr, I'm looking for hackers to help me improve a Python script.

A couple of years ago I wanted to have all my tweets and likes deleted, but still keep them somewhere for private purposes, mainly for history reference and personal archive. Because I'm not really that active on Twitter, deleting my account would probably have made more sense. But hey! I still wanted to put my uninformed opinion out there from time to time.

Long story short, I hacked this small Python command line tool that consumes the Twitter API. It finds all tweets and/or likes after a specified date-time point, puts them in an ePub book and then (optionally) removes them from Twitter. Because it's just a command line thing, it's also simple to have it run in a cron job as well. So far so good, it seems to work alright, however, there're some limitations. I couldn't figure out how to save tweet images with Tweepy and the ePub E-book generation could use more options like front and back cover images, table of contents, layout options, etc.

So I guess this is a call for contributions. If you're looking for some open source project to contribute to and this looks fun to you, you're more than welcome to join in. I'm actually not a Python developer, but a Python hacker, so this is more like a hack-it-for-fun-but-still-make-it-useful thing here

Here's the GitHub repo and thanks for reading!

GitHub logo petarov / shut-up-bird

🐦 Put your tweets/likes in an EPUB and delete them like a boss

Shut Up Bird

⚠️ NO LONGER MAINTAINED πŸ˜”

Archives your tweets in an EPUB book and then optionally deletes them.

Things you could do:

  • Get rid of your old tweets or likes but still have them nicely organized somewhere.
  • An annual archive of your twitter activty.
  • Setup a cron job to regularly clean up your status.
  • Archive someone else's tweets for your own viewing pleasure.
  • Read your own tweets in your favourite e-book reader app and cry.

Installation

Requires Python 2.7 or 3.x.

Packages

To install on ArchLinux from AUR run:

yaourt -S shut-up-bird

Manual

Run make or pip install -r requirements.txt.

Setup

Create a new Twitter application. The name shouldn't matter.

Open the app's Permissions page and make sure Read and Write is selected, otherwise shut-up-bird will not be able to delete anything.

Run without any parameters to initialize:

$ python shut-up-bird.py
Please provide your Twitter
…

Top comments (1)

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renegadecoder94 profile image
Jeremy Grifski

Cool project! Gave it a star over on GitHub.