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:
- finish writing
- git add, git commit, git push
- write toot on mastodon sharing my blogpost
- copy toot link
- paste toot link id on original blogpost
- git add, git commit, git push
- comments section now works!
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.
