I deleted my Facebook account way back somewhere around 2009, but the one thing that Kristina shows me that I think is a neat idea is the “memories” feature, where it shows posts from previous years on that day in particular. I realised I could very much code something up myself to accomplish the same thing, given I have Media posts going back to 2009.
And so I did! By default it’ll show all posts that were made on this exact same date in each previous year (if any), excluding today’s, and you can also pick an arbitrary date and view all posts on that date for each previous year as well.
I was originally going to have it send me an email each day, but I quickly realised I couldn’t be bothered dealing with HTML emails and so it ended up in its current state. It’s not perfect, I’m still wrestling with timezones — if you view the main Memories page before 11am Sydney time, you’ll get yesterday’s date because 11am Sydney time is currently when the day switches over to the new day when it’s UTC time. If I do specify a Sydney time in my code, the automated tests fail on Bitbucket Cloud because they’re all running in UTC. I’m sure it’s fixable, I just haven’t had the brain capacity to sit down and work it out. 😛 Between this and my tag browser, it’s been pretty fun seeing old posts I’d forgotten about.
Update 21st December: I found these two posts about timezones in Postgres, and between them and firing up two Docker containers in UTC time for testing — one for Postgres and one for my code — I managed to get it fully working! 🎉