mirror of
https://github.com/Brandon-Rozek/website.git
synced 2024-11-13 20:27:29 -05:00
106 lines
3.3 KiB
Markdown
106 lines
3.3 KiB
Markdown
---
|
|
title: "Archiving Toots"
|
|
date: 2022-05-20T22:47:48-04:00
|
|
draft: false
|
|
tags: ["Hugo", "Mastodon", "Archive"]
|
|
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.
|