A quick post about getting up and running with the new Micro.blog service, which is a fun, idealistic attempt to liberate our microblogs (i.e. tweets) from corporations and promote an open web. Micro.blog reposts microblogs (up to 280 characters) that are hosted elsewhere and published using RSS. While most people will publish RSS as a byproduct of a blogging platform like Wordpress, I wanted to try this out using a manually created RSS file.
Via trial and error, I discovered that there are components of RSS that are necessary for Micro.blog reposting, even though they are not needed for valid RSS.
guid
element (I guess this is needed so
as not to double-post a microblog).link
element, but it may be empty. The link
is added at the end of the Micro.blog post.title
and description
are present, the microblog is
posted as two separate entries (a bug? what about having the same guid?).description
or title
element. HTML works
only in the description
element, in either raw (<...>
; no
<!CDATA[[...]]>
needed) or escaped (<...>
) form. @user
labels in text are not recognized as such by the parser (I guess
this makes sense - the original publisher is writing on a
service-independent platform).A Relax NG (compact) schema is available for Micro.blog’s RSS format here.
To post, all you have to do is:
curl -F "url=http://...myblog.rss" https://micro.blog/ping
)and your post will appear in your timeline (as long as the file format is valid as above).
I wrote a simple Micro.blog client (BASH script) to post to one’s Micro.blog stream (HERE).
Micro.blog also offers to host your microblog for $5 a month. They let
you have a ten-day free trial. It’s easy to post to this from the
command line too using the ‘micropub’ standard. Just register a new
‘app’ in your account (e.g., ‘post_via_curl
’) to get an authorization
token, then use curl
:
curl -v -H "Authorization: Bearer <TOKEN>" -F "h=entry" \
-F "content=Hello world (via curl)" http://micro.blog/micropub
All in all, this is great fun. Many thanks to Manton Reece for putting this together, and to his Kickstarter backers.