{"id":163,"date":"2023-12-18T23:28:53","date_gmt":"2023-12-18T22:28:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.softwolves.com\/wolfblog\/?p=163"},"modified":"2024-03-23T21:37:48","modified_gmt":"2024-03-23T20:37:48","slug":"adding-a-mastodon-feed-to-a-static-html-site","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.softwolves.com\/wolfblog\/2023\/12\/18\/adding-a-mastodon-feed-to-a-static-html-site\/","title":{"rendered":"Adding a Mastodon feed to a static HTML site"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I do not update my private web page that often, and while I do post in this<\/em> blog every now and then, it can be several months without activity. I have links to the latest few posts from my private web site, using the RSS feed<\/a> and a script that converts it to HTML, but as I am more active other places, I felt like I wanted to include that information as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I did have a limited presence on Twitter, but when it turned all nazi<\/a> last year, I, and many others, left. A number of the people I follow left for Mastodon, the decentralized “Twitter alternative”, including George Takei<\/a> and Charles Stross<\/a>, I did so too<\/a>. I had been toying with the idea of including the last few “toots” on my website for a while, but never got around to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

First I was looking at using an easy solution like emfed<\/a>, which adds some scripting that downloads and displays the posts in the page. But as I mentioned in the previous post<\/a>, my website is old-school with static HTML, so I wanted something that matched that, including the content as text and links, not as singing and dancing stuff, so I ended up writing my own stuff. I ended up with a shell script that downloads the last few posts, and a Python script that converts the posts into a HTML snippet that I can include in the HTML using Apache server-side includes<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Everything in the Mastodon API is JSON, which is the hype nowadays (I’m old enough to remember when XML was new and all the hype, so I don’t think JSON is the solution to everything, either, but it does the job). To parse JSON in my shell script I found jq<\/a>, which was already installed on my hosting service and packaged for all systems I am running. While I know my used ID doesn’t change, I made the script resilient to that by first looking up the user ID and then download the feed:<\/p>\n\n\n

\n#!\/bin\/sh\nSERVER=mastodon.example.com\nUSERNAME=myusername\nMAX=10\nUSERID="$(curl --silent "https:\/\/$SERVER\/api\/v1\/accounts\/lookup?acct=$USERNAME" | jq -r .id)"\nif [ -z "$USERID" ]; then\n\techo "Failed getting user ID" 1>&2\n\texit 1\nfi\ncurl --silent -o output.json "https:\/\/$SERVER\/api\/v1\/accounts\/$USERID\/statuses?limit=$MAX"\n<\/pre><\/div>\n\n\n
This script writes the file as output.json, which I then feed into a simple Python script that reads the latest (i.e. first in the file) posts and writes a short HTML snippet that I can include. Since toots does not have headings like blog posts, there’s no clean markup-free text that can be copied to the page, everything is provided as HTML, so I have added some code to strip the markup and just give me the text. I also completely ignore any attachments and stuff, you have to click to go to media yourself:<\/p>\n\n\n
\n#!\/usr\/bin\/python3\n\nimport sys\nimport json\nfrom io import StringIO\nfrom html.parser import HTMLParser\n\n# https:\/\/stackoverflow.com\/a\/925630\nclass MLStripper(HTMLParser):\n    def __init__(self):\n        super().__init__()\n        self.reset()\n        self.strict = False\n        self.convert_charrefs= True\n        self.text = StringIO()\n    def handle_data(self, d):\n        self.text.write(d)\n    def get_data(self):\n        return self.text.getvalue()\n\n# Strip markup from HTML input\ndef strip_tags(html):\n    s = MLStripper()\n    s.feed(html)\n    return s.get_data()\n\ndef latest(file, url):\n    """Fetch entries from JSON and print them"""\n    # Slurp JSON\n    try:\n        with open(file, 'rb') as jsondata:\n            data = json.load(jsondata)\n    except:\n        return\n\n    # Output headers\n    print("<ul>")\n\n    # Print the latest five\n    num = 0\n    for item in data:\n        # Hide sensitive and unlisted toots\n        if item['sensitive']:\n             continue\n        if item['visibility'] == 'unlisted':\n            continue\n        # Extract information\n        link = url + '\/' + item['id']\n        date = item['created_at']\n        reply = item['in_reply_to_id']\n        is_reblog = 'reblog' in item and item['reblog'] is not None\n        is_reply = 'in_reply_to_id' in item and item['in_reply_to_id'] is not None\n        html = item['content']\n        text = 'Toot'\n        if is_reply:\n            text = 'Reply in thread'\n        if is_reblog:\n            text = 'Boost @' + item['reblog']['account']['acct']\n            html = item['reblog']['content']\n\n        content = strip_tags(html.replace('<\/p><p>', '<\/p>\\n<p>')).replace('\\n', '<br>')\n            \n        # Truncate date to YYYY-MM-DD\n        datestr = date[0:10]\n        outhtml = ' <li><a href="%s">%s<\/a> (%s):<br>%s<\/li>' % (link, text, datestr, content)\n        print(outhtml.encode('ascii', 'xmlcharrefreplace').decode('utf-8'))\n        num += 1\n        if num == 5:\n            break\n\n    print("<\/ul>")\n\nif sys.argv[1] == 'output':\n    latest('output.json', 'https:\/\/mastodon.example.com\/@myusername')\n<\/pre><\/div>\n\n\n
In both scripts, replace “mastodon.example.com” with the actual host name of your instance and “myusername” with the handle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
All scripts are included without any warranties. If it breaks, you get to keep both parts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I do not update my private web page that often, and while I do post in this blog every now and then, it can be several months without activity. I have links to the latest few posts from my private web site, using the RSS feed and a script that converts it to HTML, but […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,59],"tags":[61,63,62,60],"class_list":["post-163","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-internet","category-mastodon","tag-bash","tag-html","tag-mastodon","tag-python"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.softwolves.com\/wolfblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.softwolves.com\/wolfblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.softwolves.com\/wolfblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.softwolves.com\/wolfblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.softwolves.com\/wolfblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=163"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.softwolves.com\/wolfblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":197,"href":"https:\/\/www.softwolves.com\/wolfblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163\/revisions\/197"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.softwolves.com\/wolfblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.softwolves.com\/wolfblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.softwolves.com\/wolfblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}