New microblogging tools

Keywords: macro post notebooks, micro post, twtxt file, markdown support, static html, simple, display, process, github, output. Powered by TextRank.

I recently stumbled upon an old initiative called twtxt which is an indie-web type of project to replace micro blogging platforms. The idea is very simple, a file called twtxt.txt on your server per user to hold the updates. The file format is dead simple too with a timestamp and the text. It doesn't support embedded images etc but that's not really a big deal as you can add rudimentary markdown support to the client to display images from a URL.

I'm not really publishing these updates for others or to start conversations etc. so I don't really care if it is federated or not but the data storage is so simple it just makes sense to adopt it. With this in mind I sat down for a day over the weekend to create a tool that imports the micro posts from the jupyter notebooks that I was using into the twtxt file. The twtxt file by itself is not enough to display the posts, so I had to write a script to output all the static html pages hosted in github. Well, since I started I though I might as well simplify the whole process and converted the macro post notebooks to markdown as well. My end goal with this conversion was to import these into Obsidian, but I might not do that.

After migrating the micro-imap scripts to Laminar, I started enjoying stable micro post updates with proper error logging etc. But sending an email everytime to post was getting a bit cumbersome, so I also added support to post updates via a telegram bot.


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First published on 2021-09-21

Generated on May 5, 2024, 8:48 PM

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