Using IFTTT Webhooks to post RSS feed data to Mastodon (requires pro account)

Update 2/19/2024: I did this using my free IFTT account but per IFTT "Starting February 15th, 2024, webhooks Applets will be disconnected for free users". Currently a subscription is $35 a year but of course that may go up.

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Eleven years ago I wrote about using the IFTTT service to create tweets from the RSS feed of my Pinboard shares (which are written for myself and for Emily; there are now over 49,000 entries).  

Back then I was continuing a kind of sharing I started with Google Reader Social (details) and continued with App.net after Social died.

Now Twitter is dying, but, incredibly, Maciej Ceglowski's Pinboard endures. I've migrated to Mastodon (on an instance for veterans of App.net!) so now I use IFTTT (still free for my use) to create mastodon posts tagged #jgshare from that old Pinboard RSS.

I'm writing now to share a bit of how that works. I started with a recipe first published in 2017 and updated in 2022 by KelsonV. That recipe uses IFTTT web hooks: I tweaked it a bit to get the output I wanted:

    Descriptive Title

    URL

    Commentary

The recipe is a bit hard to follow but the key steps are:

1. In Mastodon Profile Preferences Development create an "application" with website "https://ifttt.com/" and Scope of write:statuses. After it's created copy the access token.
2. In IFTTT create a rule based on the RSS feed of your source (in my case Pinboard shares with a particular tag). My rule starts with IF "New Feed Item"
3. The action part of the rule is a web request"
1. URL: https://appdot.net/api/v1/statuses
2. Method: POST
3. Content type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
4. Authorization: Bearer 1234567890 (replace 1234... with your Mastodon access token)
5. Body as below.

KelsonV's post has additional details and screenshots.

The trick in the body was to get line spaces between Title, URL and Commentary. This worked:

status = 

<<<{{EntryTitle}}

>>>

<<<{{EntryUrl}}

>>>

<<<{{EntryContent}}

>>>

#jgshare

When I first ran this I'd get errors in my IFTTT log but the rule worked successfully. The errors went away.

Google's mysterious new blogging platform

Google Blogger has been largely forgotten, but over the past 1-2 years it's been receiving regular updates.

Mostly these have been improvements with a few odd regressions. Some of the regressions have been fixed.

It's kind of curious. Google still uses Blogger for some of their blogs on googleblog.com (ex: Scholar), but they also have a new platform - https://blog.google (Keynote, Data Centers). On the Keynote blog page the RSS feed is hidden (but exists), on Data Centers and Photos blog there's a familiar feed icon top right. Data Centers articles date to 2012, but the .google domain was only registered in 2014. So they've migrated some old content, probably from Blogger.

I looked a the source from a Data Center post and it's surprisingly old school readable. There are commented out tags for handling IE 7 (!) and metadata for Open Graph and Twitter Card. Style sheets refer to "/static/blogv2/css/blog.min.css?version=4.4" />. 

I wasn't able to find any articles on "Google's new blog platform". That doesn't surprise me, Google search is fairly useless these days. Clearly they are up to something internally.

If they do make this a public blogging platform I'm sure it still won't handle paragraph spacing correctly.

Blogger will republish old posts with new dates but keep old URL

So I learned something today about Google's ancient blogger platform.

You can republish old content with new dates without breaking the URL. Today I revised a post I'd written in 2008, but I set the publication date to today's date.

The post republished with today's date and is ordered correctly on my tech blog page, but it kept the old URL embedded date: tech.kateva.org/2008/09/os-x-major-version-updates-my-approach.html.

It's probably always been that way, I just never tried republishing before.

It's something I'll do more often now.

Blogger (draft) supports mobile

If you are using Blogger Draft you will find that it works fairly well in Safari.app and Chrome.app for iOS.

The new interface is responsive. 

I’d prefer a different font for writing on mobile but it’s very doable. Competitive with WordPress mobile app but expect some rough edges.

(Eons ago there was a mobile app for Blogger, but it was discontinued. I doubt it will return.)

Facebook still has RSS (iCal) feed for Calendar Events but it is insanely obscure

I thought Facebook had removed the link we used to have to see the feed URL for a Facebook "calendar". (A Facebook calendar is the set of all Events one has responded to as "going" or "maybe".) I couldn't find it anywhere even though I was pretty sure I'd use it as recently as 6 months ago.

Facebook only documents exporting a calendar file. (In the mobile app there's a simpler way to add a single Event to a system calendar.)

I couldn't even find any mention online of the Facebook calendar feed. Just sad comments on Facebook's removal of RSS feeds about 7 years ago.

I was just about to give up when a last search found a Business Insider article from Dec 2019. Some Facebook dev has kept it alive in the most obscure location possible.

You can't find it by looking your Facebook Calendar: https://www.facebook.com/events/calendar
You can't see it by looking at your Facebook Events: https://www.facebook.com/events/

The only way to find them is to use the web UI and inspect the ... context menu for any single Event.

Beneath that you will see "Export Event":

Do not be deceived. Export Event is a form of misdirection.

In fact the resulting dialog, in addition to allowing saving of a single event, also provides the secret URL for a Calendar feed (RSS, iCal) including the Facebook UID and a "key" for access:

In Google Calendar web here's where that URL goes:

It can take hours for the feed content to appear and updates are likewise slow to show.

Sooner or later Facebook will expunge this last vestige of usefulness, but I do want to thank the dev that hid it away and let it survive for so long.

PS. I do appreciate so many Facebook page URLs are readable, persistent, and meaningful. I rely on that given the ever changing menu and navigation structures.