{"id":2699,"date":"2022-11-21T01:55:43","date_gmt":"2022-11-21T01:55:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thunderofwade.com\/blog\/?p=2699"},"modified":"2022-11-21T01:55:43","modified_gmt":"2022-11-21T01:55:43","slug":"haiku-archives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thunderofwade.com\/blog\/2022\/11\/21\/haiku-archives\/","title":{"rendered":"Haiku Archives"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I started my Twitter account back in 2009 and at the time I wasn\u2019t quite<\/em> sure what to do with it.  There was a very strict character limit and I\u2019m known for being\u2026wordy.  It occurred to me that I could do something fun with this if I only tweeted in Haikus.  I had learned about that form of poetry in school and liked the concise nature of it – the syllable limit seemed a good fit for the character limit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The challenge would be to share a story or idea and compress it down to the barest limit and still make it clear what I was trying to say. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And I would only tweet in haikus – nothing else.  I did a few here and there – some that I\u2019m really proud of – but not with any regularity. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A few years ago I decided to really challenge myself as a writer.  I would write a haiku and post it on twitter every single day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And so I did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some days it was difficult to come up with something unique to talk about.  Other times the story I tried to tell was too big and it was difficult to compress.  But, every day I did a haiku.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I didn\u2019t have many twitter followers but I found a way to automatically cross-post these to Facebook.  So, in and among my regular posts, my little snippets of poetry started to appear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And people liked them.  I started to get comments and likes from my friends and some people would write their own haikus back in response.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was really rewarding to be able to share, even to my small circle of friends.   And a good intellectual challenge to assess my day and find something to talk about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Facebook changed the rules at some point and my cross-posting became manual.  Irksome, but not the end of the world.    And all the while, my archive on twitter continued to grow.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I wrote haikus to mark the occasional milestone or important event.  And when I hit 1500 tweets, I decided to export them.  I used the twitter tools and requested a file and it was ready for download the next day.  I tucked away the zip file and kept on tweeting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When the pandemic hit it got harder to write.  I didn\u2019t go anywhere or do anything and I was working from home.  But I kept on writing every day – sharing my hopes and struggles. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

My twitter account continued to grow, but then recently the company was bought by a lunatic and things started to fail.  I kept an eye on the social media about the social media platform and got worried about my archive.  I had those 1500 tucked away, but had written almost 200 more since then.  If the platform failed, I would lose those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was within a few haikus of another milestone and early this week I wrote enough to bring me up to 1700.  I posted those on twitter and requested a new archive – hoping that the archive system wouldn\u2019t fail before it was processed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As the days passed I kept checking to see if the archive would finish and manually posted the \u201cpre-tweets\u201d to facebook.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yesterday, I decided I couldn\u2019t trust that the archive would work at all.  I went to my twitter account and started to copy|paste out the tweets – scrolling through the past to find them. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But, it only let me go back so far.   And when I looked back at the archive in the zip file, I was missing several months in 2020.    I saved what I could to a document, then headed to facebook.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I started scrolling back to find those missing months – not looking forward to picking out the tweets from the rest of the posts – but I could only go back to mid 2021 before the page would fail and force a reload.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was looking like I would lose some of my poetry, but then I remembered that facebook too has an export feature.  I found that, limited it to just my posts, and set a date range to slightly overlap my twitter zip file archive. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was processed in a few minutes and I downloaded a file.  And it was exactly what I needed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With a literal sigh of relief, I turned my attention to a new long-term online archive where I could preserve what I had downloaded – as well as my future haikus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And then this morning, I got an email that my twitter archive of 1700 tweets was ready to download.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sigh.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m not a sentimental person, but this one really bothered me.  I guess it was a difference between deciding to toss or delete something  – on my terms and for my reasons – versus losing it because of someone else\u2019s actions. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And I know this is a bit silly.  Just a pile of very small poems with a lot of careful counting – doesn\u2019t mean much in the grand scheme of things, but it mattered to me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ll back up the archive to my google drive and keep this on my new computer as well.  And I\u2019ll still keep tweeting on Twitter and posting to facebook – but I\u2019m going to add an extra step and save them locally as well.  Just in case.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If twitter survives the lunatic, I may pull another archive a hundred Haikus from now.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I still have more stories to tell, after all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I started my Twitter account back in 2009 and at the time I wasn\u2019t quite sure what to do with it.  There was a very strict character limit and I\u2019m known for being\u2026wordy.  It occurred to me that I could do something fun with this if I only tweeted in Haikus.  I had learned about […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"_bluesky_dont_syndicate":"","_bluesky_syndication_accounts":"","_bluesky_syndication_text":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2699","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderofwade.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2699","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderofwade.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderofwade.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderofwade.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderofwade.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2699"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/thunderofwade.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2699\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2701,"href":"https:\/\/thunderofwade.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2699\/revisions\/2701"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderofwade.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2699"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderofwade.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2699"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderofwade.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2699"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}