# Plotting tweets with gnuplot

Guide to producing [a chart like this one](https://bsky.app/profile/tomnomnom.com/post/3lblghzb6qc2u).

This is a bit of a hack job, natch.

Grab your Twitter archive and extract it. You need to find `data/tweet-headers.js` and make a copy of it:

```
cp data/tweet-headers.js tweets.json
```

The data itself is valid JSON so you need to remove the variable name and equals at the top of the file in `tweets.json`:

```javascript
window.YTD.tweet_headers.part0 = [
  {
    "tweet" : {
      "tweet_id" : "1858951780102443094",
      "user_id" : "17440273",
      "created_at" : "Tue Nov 19 19:13:36 +0000 2024"
    }
  },
  // ...
```

Make it look like this:

```json
[
  {
    "tweet" : {
      "tweet_id" : "1858951780102443094",
      "user_id" : "17440273",
      "created_at" : "Tue Nov 19 19:13:36 +0000 2024"
    }
  },
```

We want to parse that `created_at` field and get just the year-month-day and time of day into a file for `gnuplot` to read.
I've written a little python script to do that (`tz-adjust.py`) , for which you may need to `pip3 install pytz`.

Sorry, I don't really know python so I might have done something silly in this bit, but it seemed like a good choice at the time. You might want to change the timezone in the script to match your own.

You'll need `jq` too for this next bit:

```
jq -r '.[].tweet.created_at' < tweets.json | python3 tz-adjust.py > tweet-times.txt
```

This is using `jq` to extract the created time, the python script to parse the time and adjust the timezone, and write the results to `tweet-times.txt`

Now we can run the `gnuplot` script (you'll need to install `gnuplot`, obv):

```
gnuplot tweets.gnuplot
```

That should produce `tweet-times.png`

You'll probably want to adjust the title etc so it doesn't say "Tweets by TomNomNom", and the date range (`set xrange ["2008-01-01":"2025-01-01"]`) to match your own data.