I made a thing! A little bot actually. “Bot” may be a bit of a stretch but it’s cool, pretty automated (once it’s setup) and I think provides some value out there, at least for the month of May.
So what exactly is it? It’s named Pomo and is a Mastodon bot you can find on the beep.town instance. She auto follows all of the #weblogpomo2024 blogs that she knows about and posts a link to their posts as they are made. She does this with the help of the awesome Echofeed app by Robb Knight. That’s where the automation goodness lies.
It has been a bit more work than expected - when I got the idea there seemed to be about 10 people signed up (at least in my mind), not close to 50 like now. To get Pomo all setup I:
- I contacted owners to get their consent to post (I know I probably didn’t have to do this but I think consent is important and it’s all too often missing in the internet space).
- Once I heard back a yes (or no), I got their feed address. Occasionally this took some back and forth.
- Feed in hand I was able to add an echo in Echofeed.
For each post I’ve attached the hashtag #weblogpomo2024 so you can follow along in any mastodon client that supports hashtags. I also tried to include different intros to mix things up:
- X posted an update today!
- Look a new #weblogpomo2024 from Y!
- etc, etc.
I thought that might be a way to humanize it a bit. I don’t know if that was a success but figured it was worth a try. As far as ongoing maintenance goes, I just have to make sure new participants get asked and then respond to the rare echofeed error email (I’ll get occasional “Item failed to post” errors that require a manual click to retry).
Right now, there are about 40 blogs she’s following. Add her as a friend (link above!) or just follow the hashtag to get access to some awesome posts from different people that you may not know for the rest of the month. If you really, really enjoy Pomo, feel free to get me a coffee! (Zero pressure on that though. Pomo is there for anyone and everyone to enjoy reading fun posts over the coming month.)
Oh! I forgot to mention that Pomo was hand drawn by my daughter! I love her artwork and think she did a great job!