sepia Illustration of an Indian elephant with background structures and a smaller scene with another elephant and men. t from Dictionnaire universel d'histoire naturelle 1847

I used to love Martin Hawksey’s tweet archive which I used for quite a while and mirrored on the web.

Yesterday I was reading Alan’s post: My Digital Cleanup: IFTTT – CogDogBlog which explains how he now archives toots with make.com a sort of ifttt replacement. This sounds very useful. I’ve quite often failed looking for old toots with the mastodon interface.

This made me think a bit. I’d been playing with json to sqlite for my flickr photos, On this Flickr Day. I wondered if I could do this with my toots too.

Turns out I could take a very similar approach:

  1. A bash script pulls down all my previous toots to a sqlite database.
  2. Another script updates the database.
  3. A php file provides a search and display.
  4. The search can be viewed in the browser using a simple php server.

There are a few things that could be improved.

  • I’ve not used any authentication. So I just get public toots and boosts. That is all I want.
  • The web page produced is pretty simple, if there is no search it shows all my toots. This is just over 1000 I probably need some pagination.

I’ve a version running on my raspberry pi. Search Toots this is organised slightly differently from the one I run locally on my mac. The scripts & database are not directly in the public_html directory.

I’ve put the files on github: troutcolor/localtoots in case anyone is interested.

I had a bit of AI help, bouncing ideas, tidying things up & especially all of the getting the files on git hub. I’ve done this so rarely I’d no recall of how to do it.

Featured Image: n92_w1150 | Dictionnaire universel d’histoire naturelle :. P… | Flickr Public domain by Biodiversity Heritage Library

I’ve just set up a mastodon account for ScotEduBlogs at  @scotedublogs@mastodon.scot.

I’ve used IFTT following this post: How to Post to Mastodon From Anything Using IFTTT – K²R

If it has worked this post should flow through to mastodon after it appears on SEB.

My mind is on ScotEdublogs after reading:How a return to blogs and wikis could benefit teachers | Tes. A great post I hope to return to presently.

Listened to this episode of the ATP pocdcast as they were talking about mastodon. They talked about the problems of scaling, large instances and what would happen when celebrities arrive. Personally I don’t want to follow celebrities or even slightly famous people who I can’t engage with. I love the idea of small instances of quite like minded folk combined with the ability to interact with other groups.

Liked Leah McElrath (@leahmcelrath@mstdn.social) (Mastodon)
I hate to say this because I adore my fellow tweeps, but some of the least effective content on here right now are auto-posted tweets. 
They’re visually off-putting, and the content sometimes doesn’t translate well for this environment. 
If you’re going to cross-post to Twitter and Mastodon, perhaps consider doing so manually and adjusting accordingly. 
(Said with love :twitter:)

I POSSE and cross post a fair bit, but I often just do it manually. Helps with both formatting & alt-text on images. But this like I am relying on brid.gy. It works well for Twitter, so this is a mastodon test.

Interesting dilemma, Thinking about moving to #ds106 https://social.ds106.us. It seems moving mastodon servers is not that difficult. I think you lose old posts but since I’ve POSSED some from my blog it is not a problem. Alternatively the ActivityPub WordPress plugin turns your blog into a member of the fediverse. The is attractive, but I am not sure how much understanding & work is needed. Or I could stay on mastodon.social