I thought I wrote a post about this one. I guess not. Here it is.
I have Notes on my website, a social media-type timeline of random short-form stuff I post from time to time.
The idea started a couple of years back during my misadventures on the Fediverse. As everyone knows, moving historical posts from one instance to another is virtually impossible unless you are the server admin. I was using Hubzilla for a time and whilst it was possible to extract old posts from the database, it was quite difficult to do in terms of export –> import –> convert, etc. When my Mastodon instance died and I lost everything, that got me thinking: how about keeping my original posts with me, on my server/desktop/somewhere?
And that’s how Notes was born. It has been through several iterations since go-live; for example, I originally used to cross-post to Notes and Hubzilla via RSS and then via e-mail.
I’ve since left the Fediverse entirely and now cross-post to X, Bluesky and Notes. Everything is now automated in terms of the cross-posting and I’ll share how in a future post.
The idea
I use Hugo, so my site is static. The challenge to overcome was how to update a static HTML file with new posts in real-time.
There’s Python for that!
Once the idea was fully formed in my head, I set to work and here we are.
- Send an email to myself. (A nice, convenient way to cross-post).
- RSS is not an option; RSS needs a
<link>inside every<item>which not all my posts have. - The script must check my inbox at set intervals and if the trigger keyword in the subject is found and the email is unread, process it and mark it as read.
- Handle plain text posts as well as posts containing images as attachments.
- Handle URLs in the email body.
All the above works well for X and Notes; Bluesky is another story, especially when it comes to handling URLs. See, Bluesky want the metadata encoded in the post at time of sending; they will not go out and retrieve it. I had this working for a while (as recently as yesterday) but then Bluesky goes crazy for some reason and stops working for no apparent reason. What you end up with is a plain text post with a clickable link in the post but no rich media, pretty-looking social card. X never fails, so this is not a metadata GET problem. Bluesky is still young so I’ll give them more time!
I’m updating Notes right now to include rich media, pretty-looking social cards. For posterity, this is the current view of posts or “Notes” which will soon be better-looking for my own viewing and archival pleasure.
