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Aaron Parecki

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  • How to export your complete Foursquare checkin history

    July 3, 2021

    Today I finished up a tool that you can use to export your complete history from Foursquare and publish the checkins to your website!

    In 2017, I created OwnYourSwarm to export my future Swarm checkins to my website in real-time. It's been working great, and it's meant that I have had a complete archive of all my checkins on my website ever since then, so I don't have to worry if Foursquare disappears one day. However, I never got around to creating a way to export my past checkins, so I was always missing my checkin history from 2009-2016.

    I had been considering building this as a feature of OwnYourSwarm, but realized that it would end up taking a lot of additional effort to make it work well as a web service, in addition to dealing with possible rate limit issues with the Foursquare API. So instead, this is published as a downloadable script you can run on your own computer. This also means you have a bit more flexibility in how you can use it, as well as being able to customize it more if you choose.

    You can download the code from GitHub here:

    https://github.com/aaronpk/Swarm-Checkins-Import

    The readme has installation and usage instructions, so I'll refrain from repeating all that in this post. Make sure to check out the step by step tutorial in the readme if you want to use this with your own account.

    The process is broken up into a couple steps.

    • First, it downloads your entire Foursquare checkin history to JSON files on your computer
    • Second, it downloads all the photos from your checkins
    • Third, it publishes each checkin to your website via Micropub

    If your website doesn't support checkins via Micropub, or if you don't want your checkins on your website at all, you can just skip that step entirely, and instead you'll have a complete export of your data locally.

    The JSON files contain the raw API response from Foursquare, so you can do what you want with that as well, such as turning it into your own HTML archive using your own custom tools if you want.

    The one issue that I don't have a good solution for is handling renamed venues. Unfortunately the API returns the current name for old checkins, so if a venue is renamed, your old checkins will not reflect the name at the time of the checkin. This is particularly strange for businesses that have gone through an acquisition or rebranding, since for example all my old checkins in Green Dragon are now labeled as Rogue Eastside Brewery. As far as I can tell there isn't a good way to handle this, so I may have to go back and manually edit the posts on my website for the venues I know have been renamed.

    I hope this is useful to people! I will be sleeping a little easier now knowing that my old checkin history is safely archived on my website now!

    Portland, Oregon • 67°F
    Sat, Jul 3, 2021 11:14am -07:00 #foursquare #swarm #micropub #ownyourswarm #checkins #ownyourdata #indieweb
    5 likes 1 repost 1 bookmark 2 replies 3 mentions
    • Cody Bromley :coffefied:
    • ~lohn
    • Jonathan LaCour
    • Ton Zijlstra :cc_cc: 🇪🇺
    • Marty McGuire
    • Robert ✅
    • amanda
    • Amanda CAARSON arush.io

      Hi, and thanks for this script as well as all the other tools you’ve created for the indieweb. Do you have an example micropub.json file I could use in order to try to manually generate one for use with my Foursquare account and website? I’ve installed the script and grabbed all the dependencies, and the user.json file creates just fine. But when I attempt to create the micropub.json file I get a message saying "Error fetching micropub configuration data". Thanks in advance.

      Sun, Mar 27, 2022 11:27pm -04:00
    • ~lohn lohn.in

      Works like a charm. I just forgot to disable autobuild on publish and generated about 800 builds of my site. But it was my fault. Poor Drone. 😜

      Wed, Aug 18, 2021 12:04am -03:00

    Other Mentions

    • robertvanbregt.nl
      Bookmarked https://aaronparecki.com/2021/07/03/5/export-foursquare-checkin-history.
      So instead, this is published as a downloadable script you can run on your own computer. This also means you have a bit more flexibility in how you can use it, as well as being able to customize it more if you choose.
      A nice way of safe-keeping your Foursquare / Swarm checkins
      Tue, Feb 1, 2022 7:00am +01:00
    • Ton Zijlstra
      Week Notes 21#26
      Sun, Jul 4, 2021 8:58pm +02:00
    • James jamesvandyne.com/author/jamesvandyne
      Perfect timing from aaronpk with this Swarm Checkin Import tool. I had been recently thinking about how to import my historical Swarm checkins to my blog so I could build a fun map. Will have to fiddle with this in the next week. Thank you .
      Sat, Jul 3, 2021 11:14pm +00:00
Posted in /articles using quill.p3k.io

Hi, I'm Aaron Parecki, Director of Identity Standards at Okta, and co-founder of IndieWebCamp. I maintain oauth.net, write and consult about OAuth, and participate in the OAuth Working Group at the IETF. I also help people learn about video production and livestreaming. (detailed bio)

I've been tracking my location since 2008 and I wrote 100 songs in 100 days. I've spoken at conferences around the world about owning your data, OAuth, quantified self, and explained why R is a vowel. Read more.

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