So, I wrote this, or at least, something like this, then sat on it for months, and now its out of date.
Its GROTESQUELY out of date. The new/current system is way better thanks to this thing I had AI build.
Its also a process that has sort of, evolved over time. It was a digest that posted daily on its own, but I didn’t always share stuff, so it because one I shared randomly, then weekly, manually. Then it was attached to my weekly write ups. I may still use the wrap up, but now.it just shares. And it shares to social media.
It queues, it posts immediately, it lets me share photos, it creates a simple archive.
Its almost completely what I have always wanted. I could almost replace WordPress with it. I don’t think I am quite there yet.
I wanted to demonstrate the flow, which is going to be a lot of samey screen shots. It all starts in FreshRSS, which runs within my own network through Docker. If I find an article worth sharing, I tag it.
The tag has its own RSS feed, that is a feature of FreshRSS. The new Blog took is subscribed to this blog. After finishing with reading my feeds, which are numerous, I pull it up, and share articles. I can add personal commentary if I want, I can choose not to add them to other platforms and just add them to the local time line. The queue up so if there are a lot of them, they don’t all post at once, I hate that.
Above, they share locally, below they share to Bluesky and Mastodon. Everything formats nicely too. Partly because it pulls the first 200 characters as a brief summary, and downloads the first image in the article and crops it down to 600×400 as a thumbnail. I may adjust that.
But I also like the idea of having the historic timeline available publicly. The Blog tool has this build in, a not logged in user sees the public timeline. It also does not allow sign ups if there is a user. Its a single user system. I am, not super keen on putting the software out hosted publicly.
It runs in Python, with Flask, I have set these up publicly, its a bit of a pain. It also creates server overhead. The FreshRSS instance lives inside my home network, unreachable from my web server (without work) so that part becomes useless.
So I built a secondary front end for the posts, its a simple HTML page that pulls and displays the contents of the post history file. And through the magic of SSH, the Web server automatically pushes all new images and posts to the Web server periodically.
It feels stupid simple, but also super clever and simple. I love it.
