If you’ve used Storify, you probably know by now it’s closing down soon. They have an FAQ up to help people with the transition which explains that to export your content you need to… Log in to Storify at www.storify.com. Mouse over the story that contains content you would like to export and select “View.” Click […]

If you’ve used Storify, you probably know by now it’s closing down soon. They have an FAQ up to help people with the transition which explains that to export your content you need to…

1. Log in to Storify at www.storify.com.
2. Mouse over the story that contains content you would like to export and select “View.”
3. Click on the ellipses icon and select “Export.”
4. Choose your preferred format for download.
5. To save your content and linked assets in HTML, select - File > Save as > Web Page, Complete. To export your content to PDF, select Export to HTML > File > Print > Save as PDF.
6. Repeat the process for each story whose content you would like to preserve.

So I started doing that. I wasn’t sure if JSON or HTML would be more useful to me, so I was exporting both. It was painful. Each export required 3 page loads, and they were slow. After 5 stories, I started wondering if there’s a quicker way. I’m a programmer after all, my job is to automate things. However, I also didn’t want to spend too long on that, since I only had 40 stories, so the effort should definitely not be longer than it would have taken to manually export the remaining 35 stories.

I noticed that the HTML and JSON URLs for each story could actually be recreated by using the slug of the Story URL:

https://storify.com/LeaVerou/**css-variables-var-subtitle-cssconf-asia**.html https://api.storify.com/v1/stories/LeaVerou/**css-variables-var-subtitle-cssconf-asia**

The bold part is the only thing that changes. I tried that with a different slug and it worked just fine. Bingo! So I could write a quick console script to get all these URLs and open them in separate tabs and then all I have to do is go through each tab and hit Cmd + S to save. It’s not perfect, but it took minutes to write and saved A LOT of time.

Following is the script I wrote. Go to your profile page, click “Show more” and scroll until all your stories are visible, then paste it into the console. You will probably need to do it twice: once to disable popup blocking because the browser rightfully freaks out when you try to open this many tabs from script, and once to actually open all of them.

var slugs = [... new Set($$(".story-tile").map(e => e.dataset.path))]
slugs.forEach(s => { open(`https://api.storify.com/v1/stories/${s}`); open(`https://storify.com/${s}.html`) })

This gets a list of all unique (hence the [...new Set(array)]) slugs and opens both the JSON and HTML export URLs in new tabs. Then you can go through each tab and save.

You will notice that the browser becomes REALLY SLOW when you open this many tabs (in my case 41 stories × 2 tabs each = 82 tabs!) so you may want to do it in steps, by using array.slice(). Also, if you don’t want to save the HTML version, the whole process becomes much faster, the HTML pages took AGES to load and kept freezing the browser.

Hope this helps!

PS: If you’re content with your data being held hostage by a different company, you could also use this tool by Wakelet. I’ve done that too, but I also wanted to own my data as well.

If you’ve used Storify, you probably know by now it’s closing down soon. They have an FAQ up to help people with the transition which explains that to export your content you need to…

1. Log in to Storify at www.storify.com.
2. Mouse over the story that contains content you would like to export and select “View.”
3. Click on the ellipses icon and select “Export.”
4. Choose your preferred format for download.
5. To save your content and linked assets in HTML, select - File > Save as > Web Page, Complete. To export your content to PDF, select Export to HTML > File > Print > Save as PDF.
6. Repeat the process for each story whose content you would like to preserve.

So I started doing that. I wasn’t sure if JSON or HTML would be more useful to me, so I was exporting both. It was painful. Each export required 3 page loads, and they were slow. After 5 stories, I started wondering if there’s a quicker way. I’m a programmer after all, my job is to automate things. However, I also didn’t want to spend too long on that, since I only had 40 stories, so the effort should definitely not be longer than it would have taken to manually export the remaining 35 stories.

I noticed that the HTML and JSON URLs for each story could actually be recreated by using the slug of the Story URL:

https://storify.com/LeaVerou/**css-variables-var-subtitle-cssconf-asia**.html https://api.storify.com/v1/stories/LeaVerou/**css-variables-var-subtitle-cssconf-asia**

The bold part is the only thing that changes. I tried that with a different slug and it worked just fine. Bingo! So I could write a quick console script to get all these URLs and open them in separate tabs and then all I have to do is go through each tab and hit Cmd + S to save. It’s not perfect, but it took minutes to write and saved A LOT of time.

Following is the script I wrote. Go to your profile page, click “Show more” and scroll until all your stories are visible, then paste it into the console. You will probably need to do it twice: once to disable popup blocking because the browser rightfully freaks out when you try to open this many tabs from script, and once to actually open all of them.

var slugs = [... new Set($$(".story-tile").map(e => e.dataset.path))]
slugs.forEach(s => { open(`https://api.storify.com/v1/stories/${s}`); open(`https://storify.com/${s}.html`) })

This gets a list of all unique (hence the [...new Set(array)]) slugs and opens both the JSON and HTML export URLs in new tabs. Then you can go through each tab and save.

You will notice that the browser becomes REALLY SLOW when you open this many tabs (in my case 41 stories × 2 tabs each = 82 tabs!) so you may want to do it in steps, by using array.slice(). Also, if you don’t want to save the HTML version, the whole process becomes much faster, the HTML pages took AGES to load and kept freezing the browser.

Hope this helps!

PS: If you’re content with your data being held hostage by a different company, you could also use this tool by Wakelet. I’ve done that too, but I also wanted to own my data as well.

This semester I’m teaching 6.813 User Interface Design and Implementation at MIT, as an instructor. Many of the assignments of this course include Web development and the course included two 2-hour labs to introduce students to these technologies. Since I’m involved this year, I decided to make new labs from scratch and increase the number […]

This semester I’m teaching 6.813 User Interface Design and Implementation at MIT, as an instructor.

Many of the assignments of this course include Web development and the course included two 2-hour labs to introduce students to these technologies. Since I’m involved this year, I decided to make new labs from scratch and increase the number of labs from 2 to 3. Even so, trying to decide what to include and what not to from the entirety of web development in only 6 hours was really hard, and I still feel I failed to include important bits.

Since many people asked me for the slides on Twitter, I decided to share them. You will find my slides here and an outline of what is covered is here. These slides were also the supporting material the students had on their own laptops and often they had to do exercises in them.

The audience for these slides is beginners in Web development but technical otherwise — people who understand OOP, trees, data structures and have experience in at least one C-like programming language.

Some demos will not make sense as they were live coded, but I included notes (top right or bottom left corner) about what was explained in each part.

Use the arrow keys to navigate. It is also quite big, so do not open this on a phone or on a data plan.

If the “Open in new Tab” button opens a tab which then closes immediately, disable Adblock.

From some quick testing, they seem to work in Firefox and Safari, but in class we were using an updated version of Chrome (since we were talking about developer tools, we needed to all have the same UI), so that’s the browser I’d recommend since they were tested much more there.

I’m sharing them as-is in case someone else finds them useful. Please do not bug me if they don’t work in your setup, or if you do not find them useful or whatever**.** If they don’t tickle your fancy, move on. I cannot provide any support or fixes. If you want to help fix the issue, you can submit a pull request, but be warned: most of the code was written under extreme time pressure (I had to produce this 6 times as fast as I usually need to make talks), so is not my finest moment.

If you want to use them to teach other people that’s fine as long as it’s a non-profit event.

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