Introduction
Like squirrels, people also save and forget much of our digital acorns. However, while mother nature only overload the squirrels with acorns (masting) once every few years, we live in an age of masting with the advent of short form content and sheer number of people willing to produce educational or entertaining content. However, unlike squirrels, we have systems, that keeps track of our digital footprint, which tells us where the acorns we once saved are located. But some systems just suck, especially if they don’t have a search function. So in the summer of 2023, I made the first version of TikTok favorites search web app.
Phases
At first, I only planned to create a website that I can search through all of my own TikTok favorites, I made a working website in a few days but did a bunch of improvements and learned a lot after being dissatisfied with the state of the project looking back on it a month later, that was phase 1. After a year, I saw a few Reddit posts with others having the same complaint as me, so I wanted to make this accessible for other too, that was phase 2. Phase 3 is still in the works, but it is just to improve the functionality by incorporating Computer Vision.
Phase 1
I started by figuring out how to extract TikTok favorites