Tag Archives: Twitter

Domains as Verification

Couple of days ago when I was browsing the internet I stumbled upon Jim Nielsen’s blog, where at the top it said

Verified ($10/year for the domain)

Luckily, his blog is so organized (unlike mine) where I found the post named Verified Personal Website in which he talked about this.

Personally, I don’t have enough CSS skills to do that, but I added a check mark next to my name on my blog (thank you Unicode!).

I think this is amazing and it should be used more by bloggers everywhere. If someone opens a blog they should see a check mark. Maybe a cute one in SVG, maybe a CSS trick, maybe it’s just an image, but it should be there.

Why? so we remind people that on the internet, whenever you have a domain, you are already verified.

Can scammers scam and criminals phish? yes, indeed. But unlike the not-very-social-media, it’s hard to do that.

Ironically, having a website on the internet costs less than having a “verified” social media account, say on Twitter.

Currently, Twitter Blue costs $8/month or $84/year.

Let’s see how much would it cost to have a blog on the internet.

First thing first, you need a domain, and it can be anything that you feel awesome with. Awesome-ness is the first and only rule.

Here’s an awesome domain that I found is available using NameCheap.

This is awesome!

Next, we need to host our website. Well, lemme check my favorite server hosting platform, Vultr.

A machine with a single CPU and a 1GB of RAM, that’s plenty!

I mean, with that much power, you can easily run WordPress (if you’re using caching).

Or, if you don’t want to get techy-techy at all, you can use a static site generator. You like Markdown and text files? There’s Hugo for you. Do you want to just click on buttons and BOOM, your website is ready? Have a look at Publii!

So, how much does it cost in the end? Here’s how it looks like if you pay annually or monthly, per year.

A/M	Twitter Blue	Website on the Internet
Monthly	$8×12 = $96	$8×12 + $10 = $70
Annually	$84	$8×12 + $10 = $70

So yes, it is cheaper to have a website on the internet.

Wait a second, annually vs monthly looks the same? OF COURSE IT DOES! THIS IS THE INTERNET! We want you to think “huh, 70 dollars? well that’s dope” and not about “well, if I pay annually now, I will save 12 dollars” and then completely forget about that service anyway.

Oh, and did I tell you about the features of having a website on the internet? Well we don’t have a list, but here’s some things from the top of my head.

You get to be verified, because welcome to the internet
You get to post whatever you want
you get to edit them! can you believe that?
You can upload photos and make it looks like a photo blog
Unlike other platforms, which seemed to be for photographers but not anymore, you can tag things, and make albums!
You can upload podcasts!
Hell, and if you ever want to leave, you can just redirect your domain to somewhere else 🙂

And I’m not even talking about the other awesome features of having a domain, like, custom emails! Be that person that does NOT have a @gmail.com, but @AwesomeIsHere.net!

And hey, Twitter Blue might die, Twitter might die, every other company might die, but the internet will not 🙂

That’s all folks…

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Link

WordPress.com owner Automattic acquires an ActivityPub plugin so blogs can join the Fediverse

Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, Tumblr and other web publishing tools, is the new owner of the ActivityPub for WordPress plugin and has also recruited its developer to come work for the company, according to Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg.

This makes me very happy! I’ve been using that plugin for a while now. As a matter of fact, that plugin was the main reason why I moved to WordPress.

The newly acquired plugin allows WordPress.org and WordPress.com blog owners to reach readers on federated platforms, like the Twitter rival Mastodon and others.

I absolutely hate that people are calling Mastodon a rival of Twitter. Mastodon (and the decentralized web) is not a rival to anything. It’s like saying that Coca-Cola’s rival is… water. Nope, Coca-Cola’s rival is Pepsi, Twitter’s rival is <insert a corporate and centralized social media here>, but not ActivityPub based networks.

The Internet is going back to its roots, and I am loving it!

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Tweeting with Huginn and Twurl

After deploying Huginn I wanted to connect my Twitter accounts, so every blog post would be automatically tweeted.

The problem is, there seems to be an issue in the Twitter Service either in Huginn or at Twitter. which I’m sure someone is working on fixing it.

However, I was able to find a workaround by using Twurl, a curl-like application for interacting with the Twitter API.

You will need to do a couple of things.

Make sure you have a Twitter app API (click here for more info)
Make sure you have ENABLE_INSECURE_AGENTS set to true in Huginn’s .env
Install twurl. It was not available as a FreeBSD package, I installed it using RubyGems: gem install twurl

Next, you need to authorize your app (commands from Twurl’s README.md) with the same Unix user that’s running Huginn;

twurl authorize --consumer-key key       \
                --consumer-secret secret

And now we need to set up a new Shell Command Agent.

Now, I had to spend a lot of time to make it work, the command-line options are very… sensitive.

This is what I ended up with;

{
  "path": "/",
  "command": [
    "/usr/local/bin/twurl",
    "/2/tweets",
    "-A",
    "Content-type: application/json",
    "-d",
    "{\"text\": \"{{title}} | {{url}}\\n{{content | strip_html | replace: '\\n', ' ' | truncate: 128}}\"}",
    "-t"
  ],
  "unbundle": "true",
  "suppress_on_failure": false,
  "suppress_on_empty_output": "false",
  "expected_update_period_in_days": 15
}

Let’s go one by one.

The path does not matter, as we’re not interacting with files.

I am running FreeBSD so my twurl command path would be /usr/local/bin/twurl. You may run which twurl to find yours.

The /2/tweets is the resource we’re sending a request to, -A is for headers, and -d specifies the data of the body (hence, implies it’s a POST method).

My sources are RSS feeds, so I’m using things like {{title}} and {{url}}, you can do whatever you want. Since I’m inserting a JSON in the JSON, I had to use \\n so it converts to \n in the command. Be careful about that.

In the end, -t will “trace” the command, so we can see (if needed) the POST request as well as the result.

The unbundle parameter tells Huginn to not use the Ruby Gems that are in Huginn, instead, the command is run in a clean environment, outside of Huginn’s bundler context.

I left everything else as is.

Now, you can tweet from Huginn.