Over the last weeks I have been working on shpub,
a Micropub client for the shell.
It allows you to publish blog posts, replies/coments and likes from the
shell or programmatically.
Instagram
I wrote it because I needed a way to archive Instagram
posts to a self-hosted blog.
The
internet-hater Instagram
requires one to get approval for API clients, and only approves those
that fall into a very narrow set of categories.
But thanks to the great new all-is-javascript world, Instagram data
don't have to be scraped at all - simply adding ?__a=1
to one of its URLs gives you the data in JSON.
Downloading all data wasn't a problem now, I only had to find a way
to put the photos and videos into a blog now..
I first experimented with wp-cli,
the WordPress command line interface.
It kind of worked, but the theme didn't look nice, and there were some
limitations I could not get around.
Known on the other hand had
all features I needed, a nice-looking layout
- and no own API, but a Micropub endpoint.
Micropub
Micropub is a protocol
for creating, updating and deleting all types of content on a server:
Blog posts, replies/comments, likes, bookmarks, event reservations and more.
It's backed by the W3C and currently in Draft status.
The goal is to have a standardized API to post content to your website,
and you may use the client that's most suited for the job.
Currently we have generic clients like
Quill,
feed readers like Woodwind
that have in-built commenting support,
very specific ones like the
Pushup-counter iOS app,
an XMPP bot
and more.
See the Micropub client list
for more information.
There are even services that act as Micropub client.
For example, OwnYourGram
instantly posts your own Instagram images to your blog.
OwnYourCheckin does
the same for Fourquare checkins.
On the other hand, there are micropub endpoints that act as proxy for
other websites:
silo.pub allows you to use a Micropub
client to write comments on Github, Facebook or Twitter.
shpub
I needed a way to send Micropub requests to the Known instance,
and there was no tool for it.
So I sat down and wrote shpub with the goal
to make a command line interface I can use from my
instagram2micropub
script.
During the process I learned a lot, found
many bugs in Known's micropub endpoint
and
in the Wordpress micropub endpoint,
and got to know Known's internals.
After some documentation work,
the IndieWeb wiki now has a
comparison of Micropub servers
and
Micropub clients.
shpub was the second Micropub client to support Media endpoints, and is
- as far as I know - the only one that supports updates.
It's almost feature-complete and works fine with instagram2micropub.
Get it from its homepage
or github.