Sharing my blogs to the Fediverse automatically

Released: 2022-06-11

There are many problems that come when you don’t use some CMS like Wordpress or Ghost, and this is one of them. When I chose Mastodon as commenting system for my blog I realized it would be quite a process to share my post and get the comment section working. I had already automated the blog creation process, but I still had to do all this:

finish writing
git add, git commit, git push
write toot on mastodon sharing my blogpost
copy toot link
paste toot link id on original blogpost
git add, git commit, git push
comments section now works!

However, I decided to summon the power of the command line and bash scripting once again, and I finally managed to automate pretty much all of it.

It depends on some basic tools such as sed, cut, grep, but it also requires a very simple mastodon client for the command line, toot, you probably have it all installed already, and toot is not hard to setup either way.

There really is not a lot to talk about other than this. Here is the script, its not really super clean or anything (any suggestion are absolutely welcome) but at least its serviceable.

#!/usr/bin/bash

if git rev-parse --git-dir > /dev/null 2>&1; then
    : # This is a valid git repository

    # All markdown files start with YYYY-MM-DD
    lastpost=$(/usr/bin/ls ${markdown_posts_folder}/*.md | sort -r | head -n 1) 
    getdesc=$(grep "description:" $lastpost | cut -d " " -f2-)
    geturl=$(grep "permalink:" $lastpost | cut -d " " -f2-)
    gettags=$(grep "tags:" $lastpost | cut -d " " -f2- | sed -r 's/([^ ]+)/#\1/g')
    post=$(echo -e "${getdesc} \n\n{{ site.url }}/${geturl} \n\n${gettags} #blogpost")
    posturl=$(toot post "$post" | cut -d/ -f5)
    echo $posturl
    sed -i "s/commentsid/$posturl/g" "$lastpost"

    git add *
    git commit -m "automatically added comments"
    git push

    exit

# directory may not be the top level.
# Check the output of the git rev-parse command if you care
else
    : # this is not a git repository
    echo "Run this inside of website folder"
    exit

fi

There you go, I hope you find it useful, maybe you can improve it even further. If so, make sure to let me know, I am still learning these things.