Time for another blogging about blogging and Mastodon’ing.

It turns out you can import posts made to Mastodon into your own Micro.blog.

So I did! Both @boris@toolsforthought.rocks and @bmann@social.coop RSS feeds are being imported here.

I also turned off cross posting to Social Coop, because that would cause a time loop ;)

This means that with current settings, you can subscribe to this blog’s RSS feed and get all of my posts across local Micro.blog posts (like this one) and those two Mastodon accounts.

There is a “blog only” feed that I’ll need to figure out around these long posts — but they’ve been in short supply over the past several years!

Blog to Mastodon and Back Again

You can search for and follow the blog directly on ActivityPub systems at @boris@blog.bmannconsulting.com ¹.

Screenshot of how the blog profile looks in MetaText on iOS

Erratta

It’s not at all perfect yet.

There is something strange where Markdown is inconsistently parsed.

For this post on the blog, italics were applied, but the asterisks weren’t transformed into an unordered list.

And the URLs were not correctly linked.

And only the first photo was included, not all four.

See [original on social.coop](https://

social.coop/@bmann/109496328943570699).

For Twitter cross-posting (which goes Mastodon -> Micro.blog import -> Micro.blog Twitter cross-posting), this may cause all sorts of things to happen. Sorry Twitter readers!

Feature Requests: Only import public posts

This post is an unlisted reply but got imported.

Ideally only public posts would be imported. This isn’t a cross posting tool, so I wouldn’t get much more complex than that.²

Mastodon RSS

This is a side effect of taking whatever comes out of a Mastodon RSS feed. I’ll have to dig into all of the errata and other items to understand what’s in the feed, how it’s represented, how the content might be escaped or marked up as structured data.

Micro.blog would need to run a whole bunch of parsing tools to handle these cases. At the same time, there’s likely a good case for a shared library here.

And of course — it’s a bit of a hack. ActivityStreams are a different, arguably richer vocabulary which natively contains all this information. Squeezing it into RSS isn’t necessarily the right thing to do.

Up Next

I’ve still got 3 conversions of my bmannconsulting.com site underway. It will likely end up being on LogSeq with GitHub Actions publishing.

And finally, my FoodWiki. It’s now statically published TiddlyWiki, also with GitHub Actions.

It doesn’t yet have an RSS feed, but it will, and will likely also get folded into this main feed.

But Why????

Im experimenting, as I often do when these social network and posting systems evolve.

For me, I can have rich posting interfaces on my phone for short microbloggy posts across a number of topics, as well as long form blog posts, and I get one archive. The one archive may be the least interesting - especially if it lightly mangles posts and misses images.

If anyone out there in RSS land hates it, let me know!

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1. The direct link on the web to follow the blog is managed by micro.blog. You can’t really go to a profile page directly. ↩︎

2. I help maintain Moa.Party which is a cross posting tool. People would like many different options and toggles, making the interface very confusing. ↩︎