Sharing my blogs to the Fediverse automatically

I always share my blogposts on Mastodon when I am done writing them, but it has always been a little annoying to do so. Not anymore.

There are many problems that come when you don’t use some CMS like Wordpress or Ghost, and this is one of them. When I chose Mastodon as commenting system for my blog I realized it would be quite a process to share my post and get the comment section working. I had already automated the blog creation process, but I still had to do all this:

However, I decided to summon the power of the command line and bash scripting once again, and I finally managed to automate pretty much all of it.

It depends on some basic tools such as sed, cut, grep, but it also requires a very simple mastodon client for the command line, toot, you probably have it all installed already, and toot is not hard to setup either way.

There really is not a lot to talk about other than this. Here is the script, its not really super clean or anything (any suggestion are absolutely welcome) but at least its serviceable.

#!/usr/bin/bash

if git rev-parse --git-dir > /dev/null 2>&1; then
    : # This is a valid git repository

    # All markdown files start with YYYY-MM-DD
    lastpost=$(/usr/bin/ls ${markdown_posts_folder}/*.md | sort -r | head -n 1) 
    getdesc=$(grep "description:" $lastpost | cut -d " " -f2-)
    geturl=$(grep "permalink:" $lastpost | cut -d " " -f2-)
    gettags=$(grep "tags:" $lastpost | cut -d " " -f2- | sed -r 's/([^ ]+)/#\1/g')
    post=$(echo -e "${getdesc} \n\nhttps://joelchrono.xyz/${geturl} \n\n${gettags} #blogpost")
    posturl=$(toot post "$post" | cut -d/ -f5)
    echo $posturl
    sed -i "s/commentsid/$posturl/g" "$lastpost"

    git add *
    git commit -m "automatically added comments"
    git push

    exit

# directory may not be the top level.
# Check the output of the git rev-parse command if you care
else
    : # this is not a git repository
    echo "Run this inside of website folder"
    exit

fi

There you go, I hope you find it useful, maybe you can improve it even further. If so, make sure to let me know, I am still learning these things.

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