Preamble:

I know next to nothing about running servers, PHP, LAMP, and many other things rep’ed by acronyms.

I do love Twitter tho and I do love the promise of Tweet Nest. If you don’t know what Tweet Nest is, go check it out and then come back here if you’ve got a mac and you’d rather run it locally than on a server. I tried servers first, two different ones with two different hosts and never had any luck. I trust you’ve not forgotten about the first sentence in this article.

Brass Tacks:

Get your Local Server Running:

1. Go get yourself a copy of MAMP. This bad boy lets you run mySQL PHP and APACHE locally on a mac. All that good stuff that you need to run a PHP server… so my limited understanding goes.
2. Install MAMP as per its instructions. i.e. drag the non-pro version into your applications folder (must be there, don’t argue).
3. Open the MAMP app. Or, if you’re especially cool, just open the file “Mamp Control.wdgt” and get handy start/stop access to MAMP from your OS X Dashboard.
4. Click “Start Servers” The servers have got to be a’running if you want your local/web app to work. Read: not just installing but to work. This can be done either through the widget or the app itself.
5. Navigate to http://localhost:8888/MAMP/ Hurrah! you did it!

STUCK? try this 10 min MAMP screen cast from CSS-Tricks.

Create the Database that Tweet Nest will use:

1. Navigate to http://localhost:8888/phpMyAdmin/ or click the link found on http://localhost:8888/MAMP/ following the text that says “The MySQL Database can be administrated with phpMyAdmin.”
2. Click the “Databases” tab.
3. “Create a New Database” using the field named… you guessed it “create a new database”. No spaces.
4. Write this name down and put it aside, you’ll need it later.

Get your Tweet Nest On:

1. Go get yourself a copy of Tweet Nest. You know the drill.
2. Drop your Tweet Nest files into the folder “htdocs” found inside  your shiny new “MAMP” folder (inside applications… don’t argue). NOTE: if you’d like to track multiple twitter accounts, then create a subfolder inside the “htdocs” folder, named as you damn well please.
3. Don’t Argue.
4. As per the Tweet Nest installation instructions (found on the Tweet Nest home page), ”included are two so-called .htaccess files, one directly in the folder and one in themaintenance folder. If you don’t see those on your server after uploading, you need to rename the RENAME-ME.htaccess files in these two places to .htaccess each.” This is a pain in the ass. OS X (finder) doesn’t let you do it. If you have Transmit it will let you do this. Otherwise, don’t do this, it’s the wrong solution. Instead, Google the OS X error you get when trying to rename .htaccess files and go from there.
5. Navigate to http://localhost:8888/ If you got tricky in step #2 add your subfolder name after the url.
6. Fill Out the Setup info accordingly. The instructions are pretty self evident from here. You’ll find the MySQL info on the http://localhost:8888/MAMP/ page. The “database name” is the name you made on step #4 of the “Create the Database…” section (above).
7. I highly recommend you fill out the “Admin Password” in the “Miscellaneous Settings” section, it makes updating easier. Save this url: http://localhost:8888/maintenance/loadtweets.php for use later (whenever you want to update your archive, will be a different url if you’ve put Tweet Nest into a subfolder).
8. Awesome.

Hopefully that all worked out for you. Otherwise hit me up on twitter and I’ll see if I can puzzle out what went wrong.

If you got a great big kick out of this article, check out my bad-self on Twitter. My ego can always use the stroking of another loyal follower.