Dnd Tip Tweet Archive

by Mike Shea on 7 February 2013

Twitter's recent Twitter archive feature makes it much easier to download and process our entire twitter postings.

For nearly four years I've posted daily weekday #dnd tip tweets to Twitter and now I'm releasing the entire set of these tweets in a single handy package. You can download the entire archive here:

Download the complete #dnd Tip Tweet Archive (500k zip)

The Archive

This zip file contains a set of files, each of which contains over a thousand Sly Flourish "#dnd tip" tweets from 17 May 2009 to 1 February 2013 pulled from the Twitter archive of Sly Flourish.

See Your Twitter Archive to learn more about the Twitter archive.

Archive Contents

Here is a list of the specific files in this archive:

dm_tip_tweets.txt: A simple text file containing all of the tweets with the tweet id, created_at, and text on separate lines.

dm_tip_tweets.html: An HTML5 version of the tweets. Each tweet's HTML contains the tweet id embedded in the <li> tag and the created_at date within a <date> tag. Each URL contained within the tweet has been hyperlinked.

dm_tip_tweets.js: A JSON version of the tweets. This JSON file conforms to the Twitter JSON API. This file has the most data contained within each tweet.

dm_tip_tweets.sqlite: A SQLite3 database containing each tweet. The schema includes the id, text, and created_at for each tweet.

dm_tip_tweets.csv: A comma separated value file of each tweet. It contains the id, created_at, and text. All items have been wrapped in quotes and quotes contained within the text have been escaped with "". It imports directly into Excel.

parse_twitter_archive.py: The Python script I wrote to create this archive. Also available on Github.

Adaptations

It's my hope that people will find new and interesting ways to use these bite-sized D&D tips in all sorts of other projects. Maybe you want to put a random tip up on your blog once a day. Maybe you want to quote it in your new free ebook. Maybe you'd just like to set them up as a daily koan to ponder. I'm hoping you will find all new and great ways to use these D&D tips beyond what I've done here.

If you have an idea on using these in your commercial product, send an email to mike@mikeshea.net to let me know about your idea and I'm sure we can come to a reasonable arrangement. Most important to me is that DMs get tips to help them run awesome games.

Updates

I plan to update it every six months. This archive will take over for the monthly Twitter archives I used to publish to Sly Flourish in the past.

The Twitter Archive Parser Source Code

I wrote a python script that parses through the data downloaded from the Twitter archive and exports it to the formats you see above. The Python source code is included in the archive as well. The code is released under the same license as the rest of the content. I'm releasing the Twitter Archive Parser to Github as well.

License

These tweets and the Python source code for parsing the Twitter archive is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License. You are free to share, copy, distribute, transmit, remix, and adapt the work as long as you attribute it to Michael E. Shea at http://slyflourish.com/, share the work under the same license, and do so for non-commercial purposes. If you have a commercial idea, a note to mike@mikeshea.net to discuss it. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/.

If you want to give back, please take a look at the Lazy Dungeon Master, Sly Flourish's Dungeon Master Tips and Running Epic Tier D&D Games.

Send feedback to mike@mikeshea.net.