I want to store my social media posts, comments and conversations in a standard format. They should be stored in simple, human-readable formats. I should be able to browse these files without specialised software.
I’ve been using Markdown for my websites and my recipes. I can open them as plain text, or use any of the dozens of Markdown viewers out there. Scripts can also work with those files without much effort. I find it preferable to databases and XML files.
I was wondering if there are common human-readable formats for chat logs, social media posts and social media comments.
So far, the best I can come up with is Markdown for social media content, and IRC chat logs for conversations. Is there anything better out there?
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If you’re talking about more long-term storage (that is, you want to be sure, in 5-10-20 years time, that you will easily be able to open and view these files), then I would strongly recommend you chose one of these formats that are widely use for archiving purposes:
Markdown is plain text; it just adds some formatting syntax. It is on your spreadsheet on row 347. You can read about it here.
Markdown is a plain text format that can render to HTML, but that is a lot easier to read and edit. It’s widely known, used and supported. I run multiple websites that are Markdown files rendered into HTML templates. Most static site generators work that way.
PDF makes no sense here as we’re talking about storing a few lines of text plus a few lines of metadata. It would make the files difficult to read on small screens, and very hard to read by machines.
HTML, if you manually want to read it yourself
JSON, if you want a script to read it
a actual database if you want to do a huge analysis about social media trends
Why HTML over Markdown? There is no semantic benefit here. In fact Markdown has much clearer ways to define metadata like post date, user, community, URL etc (the front-matter at the top of the document)
JSON is sort of human-readable, and it’s a decent alternative.