Baleet is a tool that allows you to peruse your entire Twitter archive and delete any unwanted tweets in a quick, easy, and low-friction manner.

I find the web interface for the Twitter archive to be really clunky for doing this sort of thing, so I decided to build a tool that let me do it much faster.

Beta. I don't recommend using this tool yet until I've gotten other folks to give it a code review.

See the Status section for my caveat. Again, I don't recommend using this until I bump its status up to alpha. These instructions are primarily for people who have experience with this and want to help me code review.

Baleet is a NodeJS and ReactJS application. It runs on your own machine: unlike a lot of other tweet delete apps, there's no authentication required, and I never touch any of your private information.

You need two things before you can use Baleet:

• API keys. An API key is just a code that a piece of code can use to identify that that code is, in fact, authenticated by you. To get a Twitter API key, you have to create a new application here, and generate an access token. In the Baleet folder, create a file called keys.js. This is where your keys go, and that file will look something like this:

module.exports = {
	consumer_key: 'dont',
	consumer_secret: 'steal',
	access_token_key: 'my',
	access_token_secret: 'keys'
}

• Your Twitter archive. Here's how you get your Twitter archive. The files you want are in /data/js/tweets. Create a folder in baleet/public called tweets (this is a silly place for it and i'm going to change this soon!!!!) and put your tweets in there. We'll have to modify them a tiny bit more, but we'll do that in a second.

Okay, now you have all the external stuff you need. Here's how to set it up.

• Install NodeJS.
• Download Baleet.
• Open up your command line (Terminal if you're on a Mac).
• Change to the Baleet directory. (You can do this by typing cd and then dragging in the Baleet folder.)
• Type npm install to install all of Baleet's dependencies.
• In a new Terminal window, navigate to your baleet/public/tweets folder.
• Put the following command into Terminal and hit enter: for i in $(ls *.js); do sed -i.js '1d' $i; done - this removes the first line of each tweet file, which is extraneous in our case.
• Delete any files in the directory that have a .js.js extension. Leave the ones that are just .js.
• In the first Terminal window (the one that is in the baleet/ directory), type node app.js and hit enter.
• Go to http://localhost:3000.
• Baleet some tweets! When you finish a month, don't forget to delete its file from your baleet/public/tweets folder.

• When will it not look like garbage?
  • When you submit a pull request with better CSS.