Micro.blog!

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.

RSS format

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.

• The XML must contain a guid element (I guess this is needed so as not to double-post a microblog).
• The XML must have a link element, but it may be empty. The link is added at the end of the Micro.blog post.
• The Microblog parser seems not to ignore XML comments (e.g., commented-out titles or links are still read).
• If both title and description are present, the microblog is posted as two separate entries (a bug? what about having the same guid?).
• Markdown works in the 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.

Posting

To post, all you have to do is:

• Place the RSS XML file somewhere online,
• Register the URL of the file in your Micro.blog account,
• Ping Micro.blog (e.g., 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).

Posting to a paid-for account

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.

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