date: 2016-03-28
title: Implementing Microblogging in Pelican
Since implementing TinyTinyRss[1], although, to be fair, really
long before that, I've found myself enjoying the experience of
reading RSS feeds far more than I have ever enjoyed twitter. I
prefer the pause which reading an rss feed gives to the formation
of an opinion. Instead of the quick-fire "must react _now_"
nature of interacting with my twitter feed, I find myself reading
the articles, processing the information, and coming to an
opinion on matters in a much more reasoned and, to me, sensible
manner.
I've had some changes in my own life recently which have meant
that I'm no longer willing to have my days torn apart by the
latest twitter-storm, be that the latest ignorant emissions
from Donald Drumpf or Richard Dawkins, or just this week's
Kony-video[2]. Incidentally, that blog of mine linked to there
is from four years ago. I've simply lost count of the number
of ignorant kony-like twitter storms which have passed since
then. Just two of those twitter-storms, naturally enough, are
Gamergate and the Sad/Rabid Poopies. I've learned more, and
experienced more, from reading people's long thoughts about those
issues that I ever have from just reacting to the latest
140-character shitfest emanating from those controversies.
Incidentally, this is not a 'Twitter Quitter Post'[^1], as
I think twitter will always have a place in this modern
connected world. Yesterday, for example, I sent a tweet to
author Catherynne Valente letting her know I'd seen her book
Radiance [3] shelved in the non-fiction section in a local
bookshop. She retweeted it, it got some fave's, and the
interaction was enjoyable. I don't presume for one second that
I'd have had that same reaction had I microblogged about it here
on my site.
Nevertheless, and hearkening to my long-standing **Own Your
Content** theme, I think that just as there is a place for
twitter, so too there is a place for microblogging outside that
or indeed any other service. If you have spent time and effort to
create an online presence which you value and which you control,
it seems natural that you should place your own 'intermittent
thoughts' within that presence.
As can be read on the bottom of every page of this blog, this
site is created using the pelican framework [4], a static-site
blogging engine. I write my posts on a variety of devices using
text editors, each post is formatted in Markdown, it is then
uploaded, by diverse means, to a specific site-only dropbox[^2],
where a couple of cronjob scripts repack each one into the
expected format, finally rebuilding the site every time there is
a new post. This has worked beautifully now since 2012, thanks to
the inherent customisability of the framework. I was confident
that this would work to my favour in adapting to a microblogging
purpose, and so it proved.
I looked around to see how people were presenting microblogs in
the context of a more traditional blog, eventually finding
Manton Reece's Definition of Microblogging [5] from 2014. I
liked the idea of presenting microblogs in the standard flow of
the site, just absent heading/title information and without the
markers usually associated with a blog-post _qua_ blog-post. I
decided to create a new category of post called `micro`, as this
allows me to have a separate rss feed of microblog posts, a key
stage of this endeavour.
This meant I now had to make minor adjustments to my templates to
make the microposts appear differently, without headers and
with different metadata. This was accomplished by inserting an
`if-else` loop in both `index.html` and `article.html`.
{% if article.micro %} {{ article.content }}
{% include "micrometa.html" %}
{% else %}
...rest of template
That then prepares the text from a micropost as unadorned text
on the page, no header, no tags are displayed, just the
content and some timestamp information. As you can see, that
timestamp calls for an additional new template, this time called
`micrometa.html`, which is just a straight pull from `strftime`
in the following format
{{ article.date.strftime("%a %-d/%b/%Y%H:%M") }}
That also allows me to set up a slug for the microposts, based on
epoch-elapsed time, which would allow me to have numerous
microposts in the one day. The system I used previously was kind
of predicated on the infrequency of my posting here, something
which isn't a valid presumption for microblogging.
After a little teething problems, primarily caused by my overuse
of the jinja code `endif`, I got it running for the expense of
about two hours, including research. Job's a good 'un.
I wanted to make the process as painless as possible, so I
created a workflow in the workflow app, adapted from the workflow
I use to make textshots for twitter [6]. You can see the first
two microblogs below this post
_______References_________________________________________________
[1] https://ascraeus.org/tiny-tiny-rss-with-unread/
[2] https://ascraeus.org/commodifying-terror/
[3] https://ascraeus.org/radiance---a-novel/
[4] http://pelican.readthedocs.org/en/latest/
[5] http://www.manton.org/2014/09/defining-a-microblog-post.html
[6] https://ascraeus.org/pages/textshotter/
_______Feetneet___________________________________________________
[^1]: After all, I've already done one of those, back in
2013!