Chris McCormick

Mastodon is a real breeze to develop for. I was able to use nbb (Clojure scripting on Node.js) to post an image using the API in a few minutes. Here's how.

Step 1: Create a new Mastodon app.

Go to Preferences -> Development -> New Application, or visit /settings/applications/new on your Mastodon server.

Step 2: Store the access token

Once that is done copy the "Access token" and your server's URL. Put them in an env file:

export MASTO_ACCESS_TOK=...
export MASTO_SERVER=...

Get these into your current environment (or use direnv etc.):

. ./env

Step 3: Set up nbb & libraries

echo {} > package.json
npm i nbb masto

Step 4: Create the code

In a file called post-image.cljs put the following code:

(ns post-image
  (:require
    [promesa.core :as p]
    [applied-science.js-interop :as j]
    ["fs" :refer [readFileSync]]
    ["process" :refer [env]]
    ["masto" :refer [login]]))

(p/let [masto (login #js {:url (j/get env :MASTO_SERVER) :accessToken (j/get env :MASTO_ACCESS_TOK)})
        attachment (j/call-in masto [:v2 :mediaAttachments :create] #js {:file (readFileSync (last argv))
                                                                         :description "Test image"})
        status (j/call-in masto [:v1 :statuses :create] #js {:status "Hello this is a test!"
                                                             :visibility "public"
                                                             :mediaIds #js [(j/get attachment :id)]})]
  (js/console.log status))

Step 5: Test it.

npx nbb post-image.cljs some-image.png

Congratulations, you now have an nbb script which can post images to Mastodon. Enjoy!

Un-template is a minimal Python library to modify and render HTML. The idea is to start with a pure HTML document, choose the bits you want to modify using CSS style selectors, and then change them using declarative Python datastructures. This means you can use pure Python to replace sections of HTML and do all of the "template logic", similar to how declarative front-end frameworks work.

Install it with pip install ntpl.

Here's an example. It's a Django view function that returns a web page. A file called index.html is loaded, two HTML tags with IDs content-title and content are replaced with new content. A link tag with ID home is replaced completely with a new link tag.

from ntpl import slurp, replace, replaceWith, render

template = slurp("index.html")
faqs = markdown(slurp("FAQ.md"))

def faq(request):
    html = template
    html = replace(html, "#content-title", "FAQ")
    html = replace(html, "#content", faqs)
    html = replaceWith(html, "a#home", render(["a", {"href": "/"}, "home"]))
    return HttpResponse(html)

That's basically all there is to it. You can use it like this instead of Django's native internal templating language.

You can get the source code on GitHub or install it with pip.

It is inspired by Clojure's Enlive and Hiccup, this library uses pyhiccup and Beautiful Soup to do its work.

Last week I was on the Gold Coast for Linux Conf AU. I gave two talks:

Piku: git push deployments to your own servers

px3d: a free software browser based pixel 3D nano-engine in ClojureScript

Other talks

I've compiled a list of talks I got a lot of value from which you can find on Twitter.

Enjoy!