Pelican-toot

A Pelican plugin to publish content on Mastodon

Hacked from Pelican-tweet.

⚠️ Needs Python > 3.0

How it works

Pelican-toot will search your contents for articles (actually ALL contents except pages) that are not in a draft status.

On its first run it creates a file called posted_on_Mastodon.txt in your Pelican root directory populated with all your article URLs.

Then it tries to post all eligible articles to Mastodon and - if post routine returns no errors - writes article URL in posted_on_Mastodon.txt.

On every further run it matches the actual articles list with the list in posted_on_Mastodon.txt file and posts only new articles (and writes them in posted_on_Mastodon.txt).

Pelican-toot is at its very first stage of development, but it is already usable in product environments.

This release can publish:

• Title of article
• Body of article
• hashtag(s) if any

Title is taken from article.title

Body is taken from article.summary with standard Pelican configuartion i.e. length trimmed to 50 words and summary ends with ... OR with parameters you set in pelicanconf.py (SUMMARY_MAX_LENGTH and SUMMARY_END_SUFFIX).

If the total length of the post exceeds MAX length allowed from Mastodon, then Pelican-toot will trim article.summary accordingly.

Hashtag(s) are taken - if any - from article.tags and concatenated separating each of them with commas.

Pelican can handle tags with whitespaces (for example #My nice article) without problems but hashtags in Mastodon are all written without. For this reason all whitespaces from Pelican hashtags will be removed before publishing (#Mynicearticle).

Mastodon APIs

This plugin depends on Mastodon.py.

In order to publish on Mastodon you need to enter in publishconf.py the following information:

MASTODON_BASE_URL = 'URL of your Mastodon instance. For example https://mastodon.social'
MASTODON_USERNAME = 'Your username for Mastodon login'
MASTODON_PASSWORD = 'You password for Mastodon login'

There is no need to register an app in your Mastodon profile because Pelican-toot will do it for you!

On every run Pelican-toot looks for a file called pelicantoot_clientcred.secret and - if it is not found - it gets in touch with Mastodon, creates an app called PelicanToot and writes API keys and other necessary information in this file.

If you cancel this file Pelican-toot will create another app on its next run (this could be done in case of problem despite the fact Mastodon advise this is NOT a good behaviour since app should be created only once).