Now that I can post checkins on my website, the next step is to automatically copy my checkins from Swarm! I still like the experience of Swarm, and I still get value out of their analysis of my checkins, so I don't see myself leaving Swarm anytime soon. This way, I get the best of both worlds.
Today I created an initial draft of OwnYourSwarm, a service that will convert your Swarm checkins to Micropub requests, and post them to your site. This is an early draft of the service still, but it should be functional enough to post basic checkins to your site.
Similar to OwnYourGram, you first authorize the application to post to your Micropub endpoint, then you sign in with Swarm. Once your account is connected, any time you check in on Swarm, the checkin will be converted to an h-entry and posted to your endpoint.
The dashboard will show you your latest checkin in both Swarm's JSON format as well as the h-entry that it sends to your endpoint.
You can click the "send again" button to have it re-send the last checkin to your endpoint again, which is useful while you're initially setting up your server to support checkins.
To start with, I took a shortcut to make OwnYourSwarm include the photos from your checkin. Since in the Swarm app, the photos are uploaded after the checkin is created, the checkin will actually hit OwnYourSwarm before any of the photos are at the Swarm API. Eventually I want to enhance this to poll Swarm until photos appear, but for now, the shortcut is I wait 30 seconds after receiving the ping from Swarm before downloading the checkin. This will work fine for the majority of cases, however will fail when for example you're on bad wifi and a photo doesn't upload immediately. I will fix this later.
I've documented the next few things I want to add to enhance this on GitHub.
OwnYourSwarm is live today! It's definitely still experimental, but feel free to try it out if you'd like!
