How many times have you shared something on Twitter and then tried to find that tweet again a week or two later? But you couldn’t. Happens to me all the time.

I share a lot of things on Twitter that I find handy. Good tutorials, new software, Stack Overflow solutions, news & events, and chances are, I’m going to want to reference them again in the future. So that’s why I decided to archive all my tweets.

I’m doing this with WordPress and the Ozh’ Tweet Archiver plugin. The plugin checks Twitter a few times a day and pulls in the latest tweets. I can then use WordPress’ built-in search, or Google, to find previous tweets I’m looking for.

Currently I have about 3000 tweets going back to the beginning of 2011.

If you’re thinking “what about Twitter’s search” then you probably haven’t used it much in the past. It doesn’t allow you to search just your tweets and it only goes back about two weeks. Twitter doesn’t keep everything.

Now most people don’t have a need, or want, to archive their tweets, but I find it handy. If you find yourself looking though your Twitter timeline for a specific tweet, then maybe you should be archiving them too.

Update! I hacked the plugin and now you can embed tweets instead of just getting plain ol text. You can see my modifications to the plugin here: http://pastebin.com/LACne6hB Hopefully my changes will get integrated into the plugin someday.