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Liked https://matthiasott.com/notes/syndicating-posts-personal-website-twitter-mastodon

Syndicating Posts from Your Personal Website to Twitter and Mastodon

The hellsite has a new king. And so, many are moving from Twitter to other social networks like micro.blog or Mastodon or are at least trying out those other options while waiting how things might develop.

Cross-posting – or not?

One of the first questions that comes to mind is: how can I post on both Twitter and Mastodon so that I don’t have to post my status updates separately? A good idea and something that can be done in various ways.

There are, however, a few problems that come with cross-posting from one platform to another. For one, it can look a little weird when your posts on one platform obviously look like they have been written for another platform. Your tweets might contain user handles from Mastodon that don’t exist on Twitter or a Mastodon post could contain a “RT” (for retweet) or quoted tweets. This can look like you don’t really care about the people spending time on the other platform. But especially the user handles can be problematic because people might not know what to do with them or why they look so differently.

But even if you are fine with all that, cross-posting doesn’t solve one of the biggest problems when it comes to posting content online: if you post your thoughts into a silo like Twitter, they are, to a certain extent, out of your control. You can delete (or maybe even edit) them, yes. But when a platform goes down, you end up with the problem of having to export and backup your data again.

POSSE

Wouldn’t it be great to be able to post tweets, toots, or other status updates on your own site first? Especially the more important ones that you want to preserve? At least, your own site will be with you even when Twitter goes away or your account suddenly gets suspended. This is one of the basic principles of the IndieWeb: publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere. Or short: POSSE.

You can see an example here on my site. I am syndicating all posts of my microblog section to Twitter, micro.blog, and Mastodon.

The first thing you need to do to achieve all this is to create a section on your site that you can use to post short status updates. This microblogging section then needs an RSS feed. Mine is this one, for example. Whenever you post a status, a new item will be added to the feed. And we can then use the feed to send new items to Mastodon, Twitter, or any other platform.

I won’t cover in this post how you can set up an RSS feed for your site. Yet it shouldn’t be that hard to find solutions online for whatever you are using under the hood of your site. And for the sake of brevity, I will also focus on syndicating your posts to Twitter and Mastodon only.

Syndication with IFTTT

With an RSS feed in place, the next step is now to use a service that will send new feed items to the different platforms. We’ll use IFTTT for that, so you will need at least a free account there. Of course, you could also use Zapier or any other automation tool that you prefer.

Let’s start with how you can set things up for Twitter.

Syndicating to Twitter

The first step is to create a new Applet:

Screenshot of IFTTT: New Applet

Now, under “If this”, select “Add” to add a trigger and search for and select “RSS Feed”. Select “New feed item”, which creates a trigger that fires every time a new item is added to your feed. Paste in your RSS feed URL and finish this step via the “Create trigger” button.

Screenshot of IFTTT: Create RSS Trigger

Next, we need to define what should happen when the trigger fires. Select “Add” next to “Then that” and search for and select “Twitter”. Select “Post a tweet” or also “Post a tweet with image”. Connect your Twitter account. For the Tweet text, you can use the fields that are available under “Add ingredient”. You can use {{EntryTitle}},{{EntryUrl}}, or {{EntryContent}}, for example.

Screenshot of IFTTT: Post A Tweet

Select continue, rename your applet if you want to, and complete the process with the “finish” button. And you’re done! 🙌

If you have a free account, your applet will only run once every hour or so. But whenever there is a new item, IFTTT will automatically post a tweet for you.

Syndicating to Mastodon

With Mastodon, setting up syndication is a little bit trickier. That’s simply because there is no built-in integration for Mastodon in IFTTT. Thanksfully, I found a helpful article by Kelson Vibber about “How to Post to Mastodon From Anything Using IFTTT”.

You can still post to Mastodon using a feature called Webhooks. IFTTT Webhooks let you create Applets that can make or receive any kind of web request. So first, we need to activate that.

Go to IFTTT Webhooks and activate the feature by clicking on “Connect“ button.

Now we need to make sure IFTTT is allowed to make a request to post stuff. For this, we need to add IFTTT as an application in the settings of your Mastodon account. Go to Preferences > Development/Your Applications (e.g. on mastodon.social you’ll find it here). Add a new application and enter a name for it. Under Application website, you need to add the full URL of your IFTTT Webhook. You’ll find it on the Webhooks Settings page. From the checkboxes below, only select write:statuses.

Screenshot Mastodon Settings: New Application

Now, everything is ready to create our applet. The first step is the same like in the Twitter example. Create a new Applet and add your RSS feed as the trigger. Now comes the juicy part: Select “Add” next to “Then that” and search for “Webhooks”, select it, and then choose “Make a web request”.

Screenshot of IFTTT - Create a Webhook web request

Now you need to add the details of the request to Mastodon.

The “URL” should look like this:

https://mastodon.example.com/api/v1/statuses?access_token=1234567890

Make sure to replace the mastodon.example.com with the domain of your instance’s server! Also replace 1234567890 at the end of the URL with the access token of the application you created in Mastodon in the settings. To find the token, click on the Application and look for “Your access token”.

The “Method” should be POST.

For the “Content Type”, select application/x-www-form-urlencoded.

Ignore “Additional Headers”. For the ”Body” of the Request, use something like

status={{EntryContent}}

You can also add other ingredients like the URL or date of the post. Just make sure to include the status= part so that everything is working properly.

Lastly, select continue, rename your applet if you want to, and complete the process with the “finish” button.

And you’re done again!

Now, whenever you post a status update on your own site, it will show up (after a little delay) on both platforms. 🎉

Screenshot of a successful test toot

~

Posted 3 months ago by
Matthias Ott

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Comments

Syndicating Posts from Your Personal Website to Twitter and Mastodon · Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer

Posted Permalink by
Aaron Parecki

Angie Radtke Great Matthias, thank you

Posted by
Angie Radtke

Louis Derrac (BOT) ⏭;️; ????; [Veille] Syndicating Posts from Your Personal Website to Twitter and Mastodon · Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer matthiasott.com/notes/syndicat… 🗃;️;Toute ma veille commentée veille.louisderrac.com

Posted by
Louis Derrac (BOT) ⏭;️; ????;

#WikiParty@michaelgraaf@campaign.openworlds.info RT @matthiasott@mastodon.social ✍;️; New post: Syndicating Posts from Your Personal Website to Twitter and Mastodon #TwitterTakeover #IndieWeb matthiasott.com/notes/syndicat… mastodon.social/@matthiasott/1…

Posted by
#WikiParty@michaelgraaf@campaign.openworlds.info

Matthias Ott—bring back @mmatuzo Hope it helps/works!

Posted by
Matthias Ott—bring back @mmatuzo

Angie Radtke Will tell you - Joomla Integration .-)

Posted by
Angie Radtke
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Go have a look at https://t.co/kYmCdOBVxl 😊🥰 pic.twitter.com/Mc5JpJExZv

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A Night at the Garden

Q:�How did you discover this event?
A: A friend of mine told me about it last year, and I couldnt believe that Id never heard of it. When I found out it had been filmed, I asked an archival researcher, Rich Remsberg, to see what he could find. It turned out that short clips had been used in history documentaries before, but no one seemed to have collected together all of the scraps of footage  there was some at the National Archives, some at UCLAs archive, some at other places. So he gathered it, and I edited it together into a short narrative. When Charlottesville happened, it began to feel urgent. So I sent it over to Laura Poitras and Charlotte Cook at Field of Vision and said, Have you ever heard of this event? Would you be interested in supporting the film? And they jumped on board.

bundnyt2.jpg
New York Times, Feb. 21, 1939.
Click for article.

Q:�What struck you about the footage?
A: The first thing that struck me was that an event like this could happen in the heart of New York City, a city that was diverse, modern, and progressive even in 1939. The second thing that struck me was the way these American Nazis used the symbols of America to sell an ideology that a few years later hundreds of thousands of Americans would die fighting against.

It really illustrated that the tactics of demagogues have been the same throughout the ages. They attack the press, using sarcasm and humor. They tell their followers that they are the�true�Americans (or Germans or Spartans or&). And they encourage their followers to take their country back from whatever minority group has ruined it.

Q:�Why do you think that most Americans have never heard of this group or this event?
A: The footage is so powerful, it seems amazing that it isnt a stock part of every high school history class. But I think the rally has slipped out of our collective memory in part because its scary and embarrassing. It tells a story about our country that wed prefer to forget. Wed like to think that when Nazism rose up, all Americans were instantly appalled. But while the vast majority of Americans were appalled by the Nazis, there was also a significant group of Americans who were sympathetic to their white supremacist, anti-Semitic message. When you see 20,000 Americans gathering in Madison Square Garden, you can be sure that many times more were passively supportive.

bund_parade.jpg
March down East 86th Street, October 30, 1939.

In a part of Fritz Kuhns speech that isnt in the film, he applauds Father Coughlin, whose radio shows praising Hitler and Mussolini reached audiences of 30 million Americans. Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh expressed anti-Semitic beliefs. And press magnate William Randolph Hearst declared, Whenever you hear a prominent American called a fascist, you can usually make up your mind that the man is simply a loyal citizen who stands for Americanism. (In a small ironic twist, we licensed some of the Bund footage from the Hearst collection at UCLA.)

These were ideas that, if not universally accepted, were at least considered legitimate points of view. But two years after this rally, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and Germany declared war on the U.S. And at that point this sort of philosophy became unacceptable. When the Nazis began killing American soldiers, we started erasing the fact that any Americans had ever shared their philosophy.

In the end, America pulled away from the cliff, but this rally is a reminder that things didnt have to work out that way. If Roosevelt werent President, if Japan hadnt attacked, is it possible we would have skated through without joining the war? And if Nazis hadnt killed American soldiers, is it possible that their philosophy wouldnt have become so taboo here?

denounce_bund-e1518119083149
New York Times, March 4, 1939.
Click for article.

Q:�Who was the guy who ran out on stage during the rally?
A: He was a 26-year-old plumbers helper from Brooklyn named Isadore Greenbaum. When he ran on stage to protest, he was beaten up and had his pants ripped off as he was thrown from the stage. He was also arrested for disorderly conduct and fined $25.

There was a debate at the time over whether the Bund should be allowed to have a rally, which  like so many things about the event  seems eerily contemporary. Greenbaum explained to the judge the day after the rally, I went down to the Garden without any intention of interrupting. But being that they talked so much against my religion and there was so much persecution I lost my head, and I felt it was my duty to talk. The Magistrate asked him, Dont you realize that innocent people might have been killed? And Greenbaum replied, Do you realize that plenty of Jewish people might be killed with their persecution up there? (New York Times, 2/22/39).

bund-foes-protest
New York Times, Feb. 22, 1939.
Click for article.

But in�The�New York Times, the American Jewish Committee argued that although the Bund was completely anti-American and anti-Democratic& because we believe that the basic rights of free speech and free assembly must never be tampered with in the United States, we are opposed to any action to prevent the Bund from airing its views. Mayor LaGuardia, for his part, ridiculed the event as an exhibition of international cooties, and said he believed in exposing cooties to the sunlight. Here is a�terrific article�on Greenbaum from the Washington Post.

Years later when Greenbaum was asked why he did what he did, in spite of the risk, he simply said, Gee, what would you have done if you were in my place&? I think that’s a question for all of us who are witnessing similar demagoguery today.

Q:�What happened to this group after this rally?
A: The German American Bund, who held the rally, had a significant presence in the 1930s, with�youth camps and training camps�in New Jersey, upstate New York, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, and a huge march down East 86th�Street in Manhattan. But their mainstream appeal was reduced by their leaders German accents and culture.

As Halford E. Luccock famously said, When and if fascism comes to America it will not be labeled made in Germany; it will not be marked with a swastika; it will not even be called fascism; it will be called, of course, Americanism. The groups leader Fritz Kuhn was eventually arrested for embezzling Bund funds and�sent to prison and stripped of his citizenship. After the war, he was deported to West Germany where he died a few years later. The Bund disbanded soon after the start of World War II, but the people who had supported it remained.

Q:�How did you decide on the editing approach?
A: At first I thought Id make a traditional documentary  with an historian explaining the background of the group. But when I started cutting the footage together, I realized there was real power in just watching it unfold, without explanation. When most people watch it, at first they are puzzled: What�is�this? They see George Washington and American flags and hear the Pledge of Allegiance (notably, before the phrase Under God was added in 1954), but then they see swastikas and people giving the Nazi salute, and its really unsettling. So I decided to keep it pure and cinematic and unmediated  as if you are there, watching, and wrestling with what you are seeing. I wanted it to be more provocative than didactic  an icy splash of history tossed into the discussion we are having about white supremacy right now.

Q:�What do you want the audience to take away from the film?
A: The film doesnt have narration or interviews to clearly underline the takeaways, but I think most audiences will find lots to chew on. To me, the most striking and upsetting part of the film is not the anti-Semitism of the main speaker or even the violence of his storm-troopers. What bothers me more is the reaction of the crowd. Twenty-thousand New Yorkers who loved their kids and were probably nice to their neighbors, came home from work that day, dressed up in suits and skirts, and went out to cheer and laugh and sing as a speaker dehumanized people who would be murdered by the millions in the next few years.

This point is less an indictment of bad things that Americans have done in the past than it is a cautionary tale about the bad things that we might do in the future. When the protester is being beaten up theres a little boy in the crowd who I zoomed on in the edit. You can see him rub his hands together, doing an excited little dance, unable to contain the giddy excitement that comes from being part of a mob. And when the protester is finally thrown off stage, theres a long slow pan across the crowd that is laughing, clapping, cheering, like theyre at a World Wrestling Federation match.

Wed like to believe that there are sharp lines between good people and bad people. But I think most humans have dark passions inside us, waiting to be stirred up by a demagogue who is funny and mean, who can convince us that decency is for the weak, that democracy is na�ve, and that kindness and respect for others are just ridiculous political correctness. Events like this should remind us not to be complacent  that the things we care about have to be nurtured and defended regularly� because even seemingly good people have the potential to do hideous things.

Posted Permalink
Liked 6 months ago

Liked https://matthiasott.com/notes/updates-about-updates

Updates About Updates

I love reading posts in which people talk about recent updates to their personal sites. It does three things:

  1. It shows the person reading your post that you care about this little corner of the Web and that it is worth doing so.
  2. It (most often) demonstrates why you picked a certain solution and how you implemented it. Maybe it even introduces your readers to a new idea they haven’t thought about yet. Most definitely, they will learn something new.
  3. It acts as motivation for people to work on their sites, as well. And it also shows that you, too, might have experienced a few roadblocks and had to make decisions with an unclear outcome – regardless of how experienced you are or how many followers you have. The medium is the message.

Just recently, Hidde wrote an in-depth post outlining his approach to adding a dark mode toggle to his site. This made Kilian link to a post in which he explains his approach of adding a third option for the default system setting. And now, Ethan has written about his recent updates to his site, including, you already guessed it, his new theme switcher.

Last week, I released a little starter kit for Eleventy Plus Vite that already respects the user’s system settings for a light or dark mode via the prefers-color-scheme media query. The next thing on my list is to add a theme switcher. I’ll read all posts I can find, including Hidde’s, Kilian’s, and Ethan’s, with much interest and will then publish an update about this update here.

Why don’t you do the same with something you are working on?

~

Posted 7 months ago by
Matthias Ott
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