New Post

content/blog/archiving-toots.md

@@ -0,0 +1,106 @@
+---
+title: "Archiving Toots"
+date: 2022-05-20T22:47:48-04:00
+draft: false
+tags: ["Hugo", "Mastodon"]
+math: false
+---
+In the spirit of [syndicating Mastodon toots](https://brandonrozek.com/blog/why-i-pesos-from-mastodon/)
+to my own site, I wrote a Python script that turns toots into Hugo markdown
+files.
+
+In this post we'll go over:
+- [Mastodon API](#mastodon-api)
+- [Reformatting toot](#reformatting-toot)
+- [Creating the Markdown files](#creating-the-markdown-files)
+- [Conclusion](#conclusion)
+
+## Mastodon API
+Before we can retrieve our toots, we need to know what user id of our account.
+James Cahill wrote a very clean [web tool](https://prouser123.me/mastodon-userid-lookup/)
+to grab your user id. For the sake of example, we'll use mine which
+is 108219415927856966.
+
+To grab the statuses, we then need to access the following URL:
+```
+https://SERVER/api/v1/accounts/USERID
+```
+For my specific user:
+```
+https://fosstodon.org/api/v1/accounts/108219415927856966
+```
+
+By default, this will return 20 statuses in an array.
+To see how to parse each individual status, check out my
+post on [displaying a single toot](https://brandonrozek.com/blog/displaying-a-toot-hugo/).
+
+You can use the limit parameter to set how many statuses you wish to see.
+The maximum number you can set it to is 40.
+
+In order to see more than the last 40 toots, there is another
+parameter that we can use called `max_id` which will specify the maximum
+toot id to respond with.
+You can then use this parameter to grab all your toots, by
+following the following algorithm:
+- Make an initial query to the API
+- Find the smallest toot id in the response
+- While the response is not empty
+  - Send a query with the `max_id` set to the smallest toot id known
+  - Update the smallest toot id known
+
+
+Together with `limit` and `max_id` we can grab any specified number of toots.
+Here's the psuedocode for that:
+```python
+for _ in range(math.ceil(RETRIEVE_NUM_TOOTS // MAX_TOOTS_PER_QUERY)):
+    url = f"{SERVER}/api/v1/accounts/{UID}/statuses"
+    url += "?limit=40" if limit_param > 40 else f"?limit={limit_param}"
+    url += "&max_id={max_id}" if max_id is not None else ""
+    response = query(url)
+    if len(resposne) == 0:
+        break
+    # Process response...
+```
+## Reformatting Toot
+Rather than storing the JSON of the toot verbatim, I do make some changes
+to it for the following reasons:
+- By default every toot has a lot of account information, this is an issue because
+if my number of followers update, then I need to update all my toots.
+- Hugo expects certain field names to exist. For example: date.
+
+I delete the following account information from my toot archive:
+- Lock status
+- Bot
+- Discoverable
+- Group
+- Created_at
+- Note
+- Follower count
+- Following count
+- Status count
+- Last status at
+
+I create a date field based on `created_at`.
+The URL field in mastodon conflicts with Hugo,
+so I rename it to `syndication`.
+
+
+## Creating the Markdown files
+From here I can construct the following
+markdown file based on this template:
+```
+---
+{Toot JSON}
+---
+JSON.content
+```
+
+I save each toot in an individual markdown file under `content/toots`.
+
+## Conclusion
+
+My full [script](https://github.com/Brandon-Rozek/website/blob/master/refreshtoots_v2.py)
+is on GitHub.
+The script will let you know of any toot IDs that are created
+and/or updated. I then add these toots to Git for version control
+just like my posts.