HPR4272: Embed Mastodon Threads

Hacker Public Radio

Episode 4 - Embed Mastodon Threads This is Episode 4 of the Plain Text Programs Podcast hosted at Hacker Public Radio. As always I will include links with the show notes rather than reading them on the podcast except there will be one exception to that today, the link to my Plain Text Blog, home.gamerplus.org. My blog and this podcast were my inspiration for writing the Embed Mastodon Threads program. Besides posting the show notes at Hacker Public Radio where they have a comments section I also post them at my blog. Then I make a Mastodon post that includes a link to the show notes on my blog and designate it as being the comment thread for that episode of the podcast. I also post a link to the comment thread on Mastodon in my show notes. Or at least I did in the past. It came to mind that it would be nice to be able to display the comment thread at the bottom of the blog post. So I made a Mastodon post about this, and I quote. So here's my idea. I want to use mastodon toots as a comment thread for my blog posts. At the bottom of the blog post I want to embed the toot and the replies. I can pull the toot id from the embed code. Then I want to make a database query to get all the replies to that toot. Then I can generate the embed codes needed to show the toot and all the replies. I'm a mysql guy, not postgres. Also a Mastodon newb. I want to know how to get the reply ids for a toot. Any help, links, etc? End quote. I immediately got responses from some programmers expressing interest in the idea and giving good advice. I did some research based on their suggestions. I had a good night's sleep. And then I made another post in the morning. And I quote. Mastodon is so great. I had this idea last night and fiddled around with it long enough to realize I was doing it wrong. So I made a post on Mastodon and almost immediately got help. I found some good info on the Mastodon API. I wake up this morning to more help and I found out about using curl in php to make https requests. Then a musician friend of mine who I've been following since before Mastodon sends a working example, with code, in a javascript environment. And I've got a plan. End quote. So credit where credit is due. The programmers, gamers, and musicians helping me were: Jeff the GenX Alien @[e-mail] EcksDy @[e-mail] Malin @[e-mail] and Wayne Myers @[e-mail] Now, I've known Wayne Myers since before I was ever on Mastodon. We share an interest in free culture music and I have played his songs on my radio show, Something Blue, recorded by his band, Fit and the Conniptions. He sent some links in a couple of comments to other blogs that were embedding Mastodon threads which confirmed that my idea could work. Jeff the GenX Alien gave me some significant technical help. And I quote. Use tootcli to learn everything you need to know about the inner workings of Mastodon. https://github.com/ihabunek/toot Whatever the API supports so does toot. End quote. So I looked into tootcli and the Mastodon API and I realized that I didn't