I’ve got a minor obsession with personal digital archiving. Mostly, this presents itself in the form of things like the current NicholasAvenell.com, or rather the database behind it from which the site cherry-picks data sources.
Ideally, I’d like to expand the database – though not the public facing site – with more and more metrics. Getting data out of Apple Healthkit to it is on my project list, and I’m looking forward to Sense’s API so I can add that too. Things like credit card transactions, amazon orders, stuff I can scrape and pull in and run analysis on.
The most recent expression of this has been “Where was I X years ago”, in the form of a bot that pulls out data from exactly 4 years ago and posts it to Twitter & Tumblr every fifteen minutes. The twitter account is protected to avoid sending @mention notifications to people I was talking to 4 years ago, but I’ll accept followers if anyone’s interested. The account was setup for jwheare‘s TwitShift, which did the same thing on a one-year-rolling basis until it shutdown a couple of years ago. For the same reasons that went away, I’m not opening it up as a general service (That’s what Timehop’s for) but the code’s up as part of Lifestream.
Fascinating project, though truth be told I’m trying to avoid gathering vast quantities of personal data because it’s exactly the sort of thing that may lead me to obsess over it.