Poasting to Mastodon Via Jekyll

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So, you may be asking yourself, “Hey, didn’t you already post the code to this directly on your blog?” And the answer to that question would be, yes. Yes, I posted an unfinished version of it. But now, if the universe looks kindly upon me, it is done.

Welcome to the POAST!

Now on Github, I’ve uploaded the scripts needed in order to make this work for your own Jekyll blog. You should note that this is specifically for Jekyll, and you will need a VPS of some kind to host poast.py. Unless you’re magic, and you can run Python on a static site.

If you don’t know where to start with all that, I suggest taking a look at Digital Ocean, where you can rent a bare bones VPS for the lowest spec at like 6 dollars a month. And that’s really all you need for poast.py to run (you don’t even need its lowest spec, you could probably execute this script on a 486).

Now, one of the things I mention in the readme on Github, is that I’m using the root user to make this happen. I want to reiterate here, you probably shouldn’t do this, and would be better off making a new user in order to put all of this together. But, I like to live dangerously, and also I don’t feel like reconfiguring everything and moving stuff around.

So it’s whatever.

I consider this project one of my bigger achievements, because it took me a long time to get to this point. Had I more testosterone and more anger, building these scripts could have driven me to put a fist through a wall at times.

But this is one of the things I’ve been wanting to do, ever since I ditched Wordpress and moved to Jekyll. Because, the way I see it, if you can think of it, you can build it (with Python? maybe … Rust?).

Anyway, I hope this is useful for someone other than me, and, as a side note, if you scroll down on this website and click the DOOM Guy face, you can play a little DOOM.

Edit: I’ve been informed that you are actually able to execute Python in a Github workflow bash. Queue me, tearing out all my hair. Nevertheless, this repo will remain unchanged until/if I decide to utilize this approach (which would be limited by Github’s monthly seconds, anyway).