Long ago and far away. And unforgettable. July 2005
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Long ago and far away. And unforgettable. July 2005
It all started a few weeks ago when I noticed an unexpected spike in the number of pages that could not be found on my website. For a few days I let it ride in the hope that it would resolve itself. Pesky agents, I thought. That didn’t happen, so I bit the bullet and opened up a log to see what I could see. What I saw was that all attempts to locate tombstones in my Instagram graveyard were coming up empty.
Sure enough, when I went to take a look, all the media files and most of the thumbnails had just plain vanished. I couldn’t believe it, nor could I explain it. I could, however, try to do something about it, once again using Greg Randall’s memento-mori, a tool that turns your Instagram export data into a static website. Last time I “tried the incantation for the ‘easiest’ implementation and blow me if it didn’t chug for a few seconds and then deliver a perfect set of files.”
Not this time.
A series of errors kept me and ChatGPT occupied for a good long while. To begin with, there was a string that couldn’t be treated as an integer. That turned out to be a problem caused by amalgamating two of the json files that Instagram graciously lets you have, during which an extra blank item was created with an empty timestamp. The real problem was not the bad;y formed item, it was that the app checked for a valid timestamp after trying to convert the timestamp to a proper date and time. Of course that brought everything crashing down.
Deleting the file of adventitious information (stuff like who was allowed to comment and whether I liked ads) everything ran smooth as silk, except for one little thing. Despite reporting Generated HTML file: output/index.html and Website successfully generated at output there weren’t actually any files there. As ChatGPT helpfully explained: “It appears that the default output path inside the container may not be mapped to the host, or the Docker configuration and application defaults are out of sync.”
The magic incantation is thus:
docker compose run --rm memento-mori \
--input path-to-input \
# Had to do this because I needed to delete the pesky json file
--output /output \ # Note slash
--quality 90 \ # Or whatever
-v \And now all is picture perfect again and I can hope that the 404 errors subside. You still can’t sort by Likes, Comments or Views, but you couldn’t do that before either.
I did raise a couple of issues at the repo. I’m hoping those, and this post, may help anyone experiencing similar problems. I’m sure it will help me if I make this a regular effort.
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