Is there a way to download my activity feed to Excel?

+7 votes
392 views
Is there a way I can download my Contribution Feed to Excel - ideally for a specified time period?

I did see the Surname Contributions being Beta tested, but I'd like to go one step further and be able to see all of my PGM project contributions (for example)
in WikiTree Tech by S Willson G2G6 Pilot (225k points)
edited by S Willson

2 Answers

+7 votes

S, the only way I can think of will be cumbersome.  If you select an entire page of your contributions, then paste it into an Excel file, you will have separate lines for each, but all the data will be in a single column.  To split it into fields, I suspect the easiest way would be to first paste it into Word, where it won't even be divided into separate lines.  There, you can do some search and replace actions to split some of the fields using the separators that Excel will recognize.  After that, you can select your whole document and paste it into a blank Excel file.

The search and replace actions would be:

  1. Find:   ].       Replace with:   ^p  (this is like deleting the"]." and typing the ENTER key at that spot to split the lines)
  2. Find:   You     Replace with:   ^t   (note that you want to type a space after You in the search field.  This is like deleting " You " and typing a tab at that spot instead)
  3. Find:   for      Replace with ^t   (include a space before and after the for in the search field.  This is like deleting " for " and typing a tab at that spot)
  4. Find:    [        Replace with ^t    (include a space before the [ in the search field.  This is like deleting the " [" and typing a tab at that spot)
  5. Now copy the entire Word document, open a new Excel document, and paste in the first cell in first row (A1).  You should have columns for time, action, and profile name (which is a link to it).  If you want date (which I would expect) on each line, you can select column A and insert a column, then each time you have a line that includes a date, you can copy that and paste it into your date column on all the lines from where the date is up to where you find the next date.  Of course, you will also want to delete the original date entries.

I wouldn't do this for everyone, but you're special to me - you have helped me immensely in the past, so if you want, I'll do it for you if you let me know what contribution time period you want.

by Gaile Connolly G2G Astronaut (1.2m points)

Thank you for your answer Gaile :)

I actually tried copying a whole page of contributions, and it showed up in Excel in all one row for some odd reason (using Windows 10). I might be able to tweak the Excel setting so that it showed up in rows, but I haven't tried that yet. 

I thank you very much for your kind and generous offer (and detailed directions too!), but I really don't want you to go to that trouble. Let me see if I can find some other way to get it or something similar, because I'd like to be able to run it more often, potentially using it for project challenges, where multiple people might each have a page of activities to download; so I need an easier-to-use solution :)

Many thanks, Gaile!

I promise that, for me, it's not a lot of trouble.  Also, I could make a macro of the process by recording my steps as I do it.  I could give you the macro that you could use to do the whole thing to a different set of data on another occasion.  Honest - I'd be happy to do it for you.

EDITED TO ADD:  It wouldn't be very difficult to develop an app to do this.  You could add the tag   apps   to your question to attract the attention of those who do that here.
Thank you Gaile! Tell you what: let me see if I can find something and I promise to reach out to you if I don't :)

An app sounds promising too.
I gave this a try, using Notepad as an intermediary between the web page and Excel. I've found that often Notepad will remove all the extraneous formatting and allow it to be pasted more as plain text. The end result is that it shows up in individual lines much like the contributions page. I can see where it would be difficult using this view to see which contributions were done on which day, as the "date" field shows up on it's own line and the only reference you have on "when" it was done is the time component that shows up at the front of each line.

But if your intent is to be able to cache your contributions and ultimately sort through them for certain items, this might work.

From a time period standpoint, I can only see that you'd have to select those manually using this method.
Thank you Scott. I'll give it a try.
+9 votes

S, See if this page works for you - https://apps.wikitree.com/apps/beacall6/contributions.php .

Copy the URL of the contributions page; paste it in the box; click submit.  You should see a table and buttons to download the data for Excel or as CSV (very similar things).

As far as limiting the dates... As this isn't from an API - just the page that you're seeing - the best possible is to limit the dates within what you have.  And about limiting them to a category... It may be possible, but right now, I'm not sure how (probably something to do with WikiTree +).

Though it's limited, I hope this helps.

Edited to add: Looking at your contributions page (rather than my own), I see some problems with my code.  I'll try to fix them.

by Ian Beacall G2G6 Pilot (315k points)
edited by Ian Beacall
Thanks for the explanation, Ian.
Hi Ian, I'm on the PGM team with Sharon and also wanted to thank you for creating this scrape/extract tool, thanks!

I thought you might also have an idea about converting the feed into an RSS feed?  We are trying to think of a way to get our project-managed profile activity feed into Discord and RSS would be one way, it seems.  Thanks for any tips or suggestions!

Hi Brad,

This is not perfect, but it may be enough to show you now and see what you think.

Go to this page - https://apps.wikitree.com/apps/beacall6/rss_feed_maker.html - and paste a WikiTree feed URL (except for watchlist*) in the box and hit 'Enter' (Do you need a button?).  

Then you should have an RSS feed link in the green result box below. Click that to copy it to your clipboard and add it to your favourite RSS reader.**

I've tried this on Chrome on Windows and iPad, and in Feedly, Feeder, and Inoreader (RSS things apps), and it worked fine.  

I really hope this helps (because it took me half the day to do...)

If it does work for you, let me know what you think should be different (e.g. the titles).  If it doesn't work for you, let me know the problem and I'll see what I can do.

* I don't think it's possible to make an RSS feed from a watchlist for privacy reasons.

** If you see the pattern in the resulting URLs, you can just edit them to get more feeds.  (The 'following' feed is a bit different to the others, because it's using an ID number rather than a WT ID (Name-123)... I wonder why...?)

Edited to add: It seems the watchlist feeds are public, so these will work, too.

Ian, thanks very much, I didn't realize you would jump into coding right away.  I set it up in a (currently unused) Discord channel with add.rss to check it out, I'm using my own (Stauf-1) URL for testing.  If Discord should be picking it up real-time then I'm not getting my own feed of profile edits; it might be a Discord permission thing but Discord might also want a particular format (see below for a wikitree rss feed that IS currently working). 

What I'm after, which sounds like it might not be possible, is a watchlist activity feed for project-managed profiles so it has the '&watchlist=1' parameter in the URL.

I noticed that the currently working feed which monitors G2G for PGM-tagged posts (https://www.wikitree.com/g2g/feed/tag/pgm.rss)  generates an XML document starting with:

<rss version="2.0">

<channel>

<title>WikiTree G2G - Recent questions tagged pgm</title... etc etc

So I think there is much more going on behind the scenes.  This generates generates a nice format in Discord with hyperlinks, Bold text etc etc so maybe more than is necessary strictly necessary.  The URL we are putting into the OTHER extract generator is this https://www.wikitree.com/index.php?title=Special:NetworkFeed&who=WikiTree-30&l=500&watchlist=1&hideown=0&p=1

Thanks very much for what you've done already; if it's not possible to convert a watchlist activity feed into RSS, then this may be a no-go.

One thought re: privacy, and I'm no lawyer, but I would think there's not an issue since the PGM watchlist link that I used below is one that Wikitree already provides for me and all other PGM members.  So I clearly have permission to see it on a web page today in the standard "Family Activity Feed".  Therefore we are not talking about exposing any new data to any new people from any new sources, this is just reformatting existing, published data.  But as I said, I'm no lawyer.

I guess as this is a watchlist of a project, it's public?  (I can see it, so...)  So there shouldn't be a problem doing this.  I'll just have to change the code a little.*  

As I said, the feeds I've set up worked fine in those RSS apps (and yes, they have all the XML stuff going on behind the scenes), but it did take me a while to do it (never tried before...).  I don't know about Discord, so I'll take a look.  I'll get back to you - maybe in a few hours.

* Edited to add: I wrote this before seeing your previous message.

Good morning Ian.

I am looking at my Ancestor Activity Feed and when a picture is uploaded it is throwing the time into the next column to the right.

  • 15 Mar 2021 @ 00:09
  • 14 Mar 2021 @ 23:25

Also for (27 Mar 2021 @ 18:20) it didn't pickup the gedcom file that was uploaded for GEDcompare

Also for (11 Mar 2021 @ 04:43) it didn't pickup "asked a question about"

Thanks Ian, trying it now.  I also suspect it might be a permissions thing, I've read about Discord bots being allowed to do things in channels that human-people can't.  I'll ask one of our people with admin permissions to try it out.

Result: nothing appeared on Discord, although when I refresh that URL in my chrome browser I do see the edit that I just made a few seconds ago.  Maybe this is an issue of an RSS "server" for lack of a better term that pushes a feed as apparently happens with G2G tagged questions so the Discord rss.add function is just subscribing?  So your app works great to pull a web page in an RSS format, but there is a pub/sub mechanism lacking that Discord requires.  I'm probably mangling terms, I was a mainframe and database programmer but not in the app-server world.
Tommy, I think I've fixed those problems now.

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