Posting blogs as Mastodon Toots

What is better than posting a blog post? Posting about your posting pipeline. I did this previously with Twitter.

the elephant in the room

mastodon.social does not support any formatting in the status posts. Yes, there are other instances which have patches to enable features such as markdown formatting, but there is no upstream support.

time to code

My website is built using a really simple static site generator I wrote in Python. Therefore, each post is self-contained in a Markdown file with the necessary metadata.

@@ -62,13 +62,13 @@ Therefore, each post is self-contained in a Markdown file with the necessary met

I initially planned on having a command line parser and some more flags.

interacting with mastodon

I ended up using mastodon.py rather than crafting requests by hand. Each statuspost/toot call returns a statusid that can be then used as an inreplyto parameter.

For the code snippets, seeing that mastodon does not support native formatting, I am resorting to using ray-so.

reading markdown

I am using a bunch of regex hacks, and reading the blog post line by line. Because there is no markdown support, I append all the links to the end of the toot. @@ -97,7 +97,7 @@ In this case, I can extract the tags from the front matter.

code snippet support

I am running akashrchandran/Rayso-API.

@@ -117,19 +117,19 @@ In this case, I can extract the tags from the front matter.

threads! threads! threads!

Even though mastodon does officially have a higher character limit than Twitter. I prefer the way threads look.

result

Everything does seem to work! Seeing that you are reading this on Mastodon, and that I have updated this section.

what's next?

Here is the current code:

-- cgit v1.2.3 From 9e620084e57378952c1a7f8e0a772ebebd18932b Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Navan Chauhan Date: Wed, 27 Mar 2024 20:35:09 -0600 Subject: quick fix --- docs/posts/2022-12-25-blog-to-toot.html | 6 +++--- 1 file changed, 3 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-) (limited to 'docs/posts/2022-12-25-blog-to-toot.html') diff --git a/docs/posts/2022-12-25-blog-to-toot.html b/docs/posts/2022-12-25-blog-to-toot.html index 4d9eb10..fd44801 100644 --- a/docs/posts/2022-12-25-blog-to-toot.html +++ b/docs/posts/2022-12-25-blog-to-toot.html @@ -6,13 +6,13 @@ - id="posting-blogs-as-mastodon-toots">Posting blogs as Mastodon Toots + Posting blogs as Mastodon Toots - Posting blogs as Mastodon Toots" /> - Posting blogs as Mastodon Toots" /> + + -- cgit v1.2.3 From 01ff93c9c16867216f2d249664803860e1d6d5eb Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Navan Chauhan Date: Wed, 27 Mar 2024 22:49:40 -0600 Subject: generate new theme --- docs/posts/2022-12-25-blog-to-toot.html | 55 ++++++++++++++++++++++----------- 1 file changed, 37 insertions(+), 18 deletions(-) (limited to 'docs/posts/2022-12-25-blog-to-toot.html') diff --git a/docs/posts/2022-12-25-blog-to-toot.html b/docs/posts/2022-12-25-blog-to-toot.html index fd44801..cb1f9e4 100644 --- a/docs/posts/2022-12-25-blog-to-toot.html +++ b/docs/posts/2022-12-25-blog-to-toot.html @@ -2,14 +2,26 @@ - + + + + + Posting blogs as Mastodon Toots + + + + + + + - Posting blogs as Mastodon Toots - @@ -29,21 +41,27 @@ - - - + + +

- +

Posting blogs as Mastodon Toots

What is better than posting a blog post? Posting about your posting pipeline. I did this previously with Twitter.

@@ -326,14 +344,15 @@ Seeing that you are reading this on Mastodon, and that I have updated this secti

Not the best thing I have ever written, but it works!

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-- cgit v1.2.3 From de19543d7fb44d343b052dc9b34ede78620c4a46 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Navan Chauhan Date: Wed, 27 Mar 2024 23:36:55 -0600 Subject: Generate --- docs/posts/2022-12-25-blog-to-toot.html | 16 ++++++++++++++-- 1 file changed, 14 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-) (limited to 'docs/posts/2022-12-25-blog-to-toot.html') diff --git a/docs/posts/2022-12-25-blog-to-toot.html b/docs/posts/2022-12-25-blog-to-toot.html index cb1f9e4..6095d30 100644 --- a/docs/posts/2022-12-25-blog-to-toot.html +++ b/docs/posts/2022-12-25-blog-to-toot.html @@ -46,7 +46,7 @@ + +

-- cgit v1.2.3 From a982ceab0b45609991179b3020a00260eed6f798 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Navan Chauhan Date: Wed, 27 Mar 2024 23:45:59 -0600 Subject: css --- docs/posts/2022-12-25-blog-to-toot.html | 1 + 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+) (limited to 'docs/posts/2022-12-25-blog-to-toot.html') diff --git a/docs/posts/2022-12-25-blog-to-toot.html b/docs/posts/2022-12-25-blog-to-toot.html index 6095d30..ad2e7d5 100644 --- a/docs/posts/2022-12-25-blog-to-toot.html +++ b/docs/posts/2022-12-25-blog-to-toot.html @@ -5,6 +5,7 @@ + Posting blogs as Mastodon Toots -- cgit v1.2.3