backfill
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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)
- 2018-03-05
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
- ditchbook - a toolkit for taking a Facebook export and migrating selected content to your Micropub compatible website, including Micro.blog websites.
Tumblr
- Tumblr Importer - import Tumblr posts into a WordPress blog
- 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- Tweet Nest - archived software that is no longer maintained, but may be useful for a developer to fork and update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
Articles
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:
See Also
- export - Includes methods and help for exporting from silos for backfill
- import
- post migration
- Perils of Backfill
- From
Tantek Çelik on 20 October 2021 "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."
- Questions about what this meant in events/2026-03-18-hwc-pacific - what we came up with is the ricks of automated processes for populating websites which may have secondary effects: filling feeds with old stuff, making it appear that an old post was just posted, suddenly syndicating our to other silo
- From
- 2026-03-11 I’m bringing everything back to my website
Why am I doing all this? Because I got inspired by the concept of POSSE: “Publish on your own, syndicate elsewhere.” For me, ROOTS is the logical first step toward that: “Return Old Online Things to your own Site” (yes, I made this up).