monkinetic the blog

Posts tagged with 'hashtags' (3 posts)

Update on Goldfrog

Over on Mastodon, @[email protected] said:

I’ll be excited to beta test another blogging platform. (Still a Tumblr nerd at heart.)

Unfortunately I’m not sure I’d inflict Goldfrog on anyone at this point. 🤣 However, it’s still fun to hack on, so here are some salient points:

My favorite features:

  • A Twitter-sized posting form right at the top of the home page for posting short notes, supports Markdown, has a character counter for fun
  • Posts support tags, and #hashtags in posts are auto-linked for searching by tag on the site
  • I have a separate posting form I can use for longer posts
  • Posts can be syndicated to Mastodon, POSSE-style

As for running Goldfrog, it’s just a Go binary running off a config file, a theme directory, and a directory of content. There’s a separate tool for indexing posts from the filesystem into sqlite (usually only done when installing or updating from git).

  • Runs on a DO droplet, currently deployed with ansible
  • The only “admin” functionality is posting and editing posts, everything else is editing a config in git. “Admin” is based on a security-through-obscurity login url and a hardcoded user and password in the configs. This is dumb ;) and I’m experimenting with supporting Gitlab OAUth for login.
  • Posts are stored in git as Markdown files with yaml headers
  • posts are read into a SQLite db for serving and searching

I enjoy hacking on Goldfrog, and sure I’d like it if someone had a barebones product like it, but I have no interest in supporting either an actual open-source product, or running an entire damn “platform”. 💜

#goldfrog #blogging #mastodon #indieweb #hashtags

Steve Ivy

POSSE is the #IndieWeb acronym for Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Everywhere. It’s something I’m playing with in Goldfrog.

A common idiom is to differentiate Notes (small microblog-like posts) from Articles (longer blog posts with a title). Right now Goldfrog has a basic blog Post type, with (ID, Title, Slug, Tags, Body). I’d like to keep the posting experience as simple as possible, so I’m thinking about how to handle something that literally just has a Body (and Tags, because I parse and attach any #hashtags - see? - in the content).

My Posts have an ID, though a uniqueness constraint on the slug means I could use that instead. But Notes don’t have a title to “slugify” (it is too a word). Goldfrog also writes every post to the filesystem as a Jekyll-compatible markdown file, so I would need to figure out what format and filename/slug would be appropriate so that they get a permalink.

Url Options

  • 2020/01/16/note-ab43f6 unique hash id
  • 2020/01/16/note-13:25 HH:MM

Actual Progress

An upcoming build of Goldfrog will support new “kind” of Post, albeit only differentiated by the presence of a title. I’ve made a few UI and backend changes to support notes:

http://monkinetic.blog/uploads/Screen Shot 2020-01-17 at 7.58.03 AM.png

  • Notes get a slug that is constructed from the string “txt-” + a shortened hash based on the note’s content, like txt-8213d2c
  • Since notes are short enough to look weird on a typical post-detail page, I created a new “Daily Digest” page on the site that shows only the posts for a given day. This is the default target for the permalink for Notes. The slug is used as the id attribute on the note, so the link jumps directly to the note on the digest page. This results in a “permalink” like “YYYY-MM-DD/#txt-8213d2c”
  • The Syndicate options (currently for Twitter and Mastodon) are now enabled by default for notes.
  • Clicking the “post form” link takes me to a longer post form with options for a title, custom slug, tags, and a larger content area for writing.

Still to work out

  • I’m thinking about implementing Webmentions for Goldfrog, since I control the code.
  • I’m still pondering how to connect a post or note with it’s syndicated version, to allow likes from this site to propagate to the syndicated site. That feels… harder than I want to dig into right now, but I’ll be looking for ideas.

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Steve Ivy

A late feature I added to #goldfrog that I was really happy about: hashtags! I love them on social media, and since I included a tags fields in the blog schema… so I added some code that parses hashtags when posts are saved, and adds them to the post tags. I also added a tag search to the site, and I have a filter that auto-links hashtags to the tag search.

So be prepared to see lots of #hashtags in my posts now :)

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