a rickety bridge of impossible crossing

Violating my sacrosanct one-post-per-day rule to apologize and explain why a ton of garbage might have shown up in your RSS feed:

I remembered that I have a botsin.space account I set up in case anyone on the fediverse wanted to use it to get blog updates. Contrary to the name of the instance, the account was never actually a bot: I never had the spoons to figure out how to set one up, so I just manually updated it every time there was a new blog entry.

Needless to say, I don't want to do that, so I stopped doing it. But I had some time today and figured what the hey, setting up a bot can't be that hard. I found a very helpful set of instructions by Kelson at hyperborea.org, and it seemed simple enough. I set up an "if this, then that" (IfTTT.com) trigger so that every time the RSS feed updates, it uses a webhook to send a little request to an app on my botsin.space account.

Well, in theory. The bearblog RSS feed doesn't seem to format dates in a way that IfTTT can grok. I kept trying to figure out what I was doing wrong (hence all the spam in your feeds, sorry about that) and it just wouldn't go.

So, I tried to do the same thing at zapier.com, which is like IfTTT but different. This time, it can see the blog updates, but I don't know how to make it interface with botsin.space. The webhook interface is different and I don't know how to make them communicate with each other.

Undeterred,¹ I realized zapier.com would probably be pretty good at interfacing with twitter. So I brought my old twitter account out of retirement, and I was right. Zapier.com is nicer than IfTTT in that it will actually let you do a dry run with test data, to make sure everything is working properly before it goes live, so no more endless fake test entries. I got that working, so then it was just a matter of linking twitter to botsin.space, which was easy to do with IfTTT.

So finally, if you want to get blog updates on the fediverse, now you can. The account is @bluelander. It doesn't post to any public timelines, so no spam, it's 100% opt-in. I'll check in occasionally to see replies and whatnot.

As a bonus side effect, if you want to get blog updates on twitter (not recommended), you can do that too. The account is @dukeofthebump. I don't intend to monitor this account at all, but if you're a twitter haver, knock yourself out.

So in conclusion:

RSS -> zapier -> twitter -> IfTTT -> mastodon

A rickety bridge that, against all odds, seems to be crossable after all 🦝

#unlisted