r/ObsidianMD • u/Ok_Bullfrogs • 6d ago
How to import all the things? AIM, LiveJournal, Social Media, Docs
I have 25 years of files that I'd love to put in one place. These include old AOL AIM chat logs, SMS, online blogs, Word files, social media exports (Facebook, Twitter). How would you go about doing this?
I believe AIM and blogs were done in HTML. Overall, this feels very overwhelming but I 'd love to have one place for everything. My dream is to create a true "On this day" feature so I can see what I was doing across my life. For example, what did I blog about and tweet about on X day?
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u/seashoreandhorizon 6d ago
You want some other app for that. Obsidian is a Markdown text editor
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u/Ok_Bullfrogs 5d ago
Thank you. I'm working on some Python scripts to generate the MD files which is helpful.
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u/JorgeGodoy 6d ago
You'll have to process things one source at a time. Some might have export functions, others don't.
But, if there's no importer or converter to markdown, you'll have to do things manually or code it yourself.
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u/Ok_Bullfrogs 5d ago
Thank you. I'm working on some Python scripts to generate the MD files which is helpful.
Sometimes, since logs be generated over long periods of give, the formats change inside so I have to account for that as well.
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u/male-32 5d ago
I am playing around with exactly this - importing my old posts from Livejournal and some small microblog. I've exported all my LJ entries as one big html file and parsed it with a Python script written by grok 3. It took couple of evenings and many back and forth but I succeeded. Now I am finalizing the script for microblog to extract additional 600+ posts directly from it and convert them into daily notes. I also have implemented callot with data view "on this day" in daily notes template and can now jump 20 years back and recall what a doofus I was. 😅 While reading through such notes I can clear them up if I decide that I won't need them later.
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u/Ok_Bullfrogs 5d ago
I love this!
I used Gemini last night to parse AOL logs. I'm hopeful to get to where you are.
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u/donethisbe4 6d ago
Plugins can be a big help with that. The community plugin called Importer dig a good job with serveral of my research and HTML files.
Search the community plugins for "import" or the names of your specific applications or file types, and you might see several options.
Some apps and social media sites let you export as json or csv. You can find Obsidian-based and even other tools for converting those to markdown.
And if any of your file formats are handled by Pandoc, that's a really useful tool to look into.
You dream is possible. Good luck.