backfill

This article is a stub. You can help the IndieWeb wiki by expanding it.

backfill is the action of importing all your past posts, typically from a social media silo, into your own site.

Indieweb Examples

• Chris Aldrich has used import to backfill posts from past silo sites including WordPress.com, Posterous, and Twitpic amongst others.
• Peter Molnar has written about some of his backfill work as well as his reasons why.
• Anthony Ciccarello used a custom script to backfill Instagram posts from a combination of the Instagram export and website scraping in June 2022
• Jonathan LaCour has written about backfilling from Facebook and Instagram
  • 2018-03-05 Jonathan LaCour: Freeing Myself from Facebook (archived)
• Kelson Vibber has backfilled posts from various silos, starting with smaller blog/community sites and continuing with LiveJournal, WordPress.com, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr and so on.

Tools

Facebook

• ditchbook - a toolkit for taking a Facebook export and migrating selected content to your Micropub compatible website, including Micro.blog websites.

Instagram

• Help page for importing Instagram to Micro.blog

Tumblr

• Tumblr Importer - import Tumblr posts into a WordPress blog

Twitter

• gist for extracting liked tweet URLs from tweetdeck — because as of 2022-11-19, twitter archives don’t seem to be available.
• Tweet Nest - archived software that is no longer maintained, but may be useful for a developer to fork and update

WordPress

• Help page for importing WordPress posts to Micro.blog

Articles

• 2017-07-08 Peter Molnar: Bookmarks, favs, likes - backfilling years of gaps (archived)

Related

retro posting

A special form of backfill is the creation of back dated posts (retroposting) for content created before the web, or before you started blogging / publishing on the web. See:

• throwback#Past_Dating

See Also

• export - Includes methods and help for exporting from silos for backfill
• import
• post migration
• Pro-tip: do not treat or implement backfilling or any kind of importing as posts as any kind of scripted or automated creating of posts. There's a huge difference between an author creating a post (e.g. via Micropub), and creating post entries directly into storage and rebuilding any indices or archive pages accordingly. Be sure to do the latter, not the former.