So, I’m in the process of closing my micro.blog account, which means I need to find another way to send posts and notes to Mastodon.
My set up
I have a static site generated by a Python script, and I use rsync to move files from my laptop to my hosting. The script basically takes folders of pages, posts and titleless notes in Markdown and YAML format, and converts them to HTML files. It also creates a couple of RSS feeds:
- Main posts RSS feed
- Notes and links feed (syndicated as-is to my Mastodon account)
One of the good things about micro.blog was that it could take an RSS feed, publish the latest entry to the micro.blog timeline and then crosspost it to various services, such as Mastodon. This enabled me to publish to my blog and syndicate to various social media, rather than post directly to them.
Without micro.blog I need an alternative. After a bit of fishing around I’ve landed on Echofeed. It costs $25/year. In return, it:
- lets you send posts from any RSS feed to a range of social media, including Mastodon
- lets you format what it sends to the various social media so it’ll look exactly how you like (so I don’t append the permalink to notes and full blog posts are preceded by “Blogged 🖊️”)
- send any links within your post as webmentions
The ability to format a social media post however you like makes it better than micro.blog, as does the fact it polls for new RSS entries every two minutes rather than the hours micro.blog could take. Seems to work well, and moving my notes to my Python script from a £1/month WordPress site means I nearly cover the $25/year subscription.