MyStatusTool

There are 29 posts filed in MyStatusTool (this is page 1 of 3).

Open letter to Dave Winer’s call to develop feed-based social media apps

On December 3, Dave Winer published a “call to develop” for a feed-based social media app (he mentioned Mastodon in his post, but could be any social media app out there in my opinion). Sounds great to me! I have a feed-based app using rssCloud for notification called MyStatusTool (link to Github repo and my install). It is implemented using Node.js, Express, and Embedded Javascript for templating. It inspired Colin Walker to develop a PHP implementation of the tool (Github repo, his install). We were able to use our tools to interop with each other (have a real-time conversation), and to follow other feeds using rssCloud for notification. I have tested my implementation with the rssCloud user feeds from FeedLand and WordPress.com in addition to Colin Walker’s MyStatusTool implementation, and verified the real-time performance (new posts showed up almost immediately).

Now, is MyStatusTool a fully-developed thing? Nope! It’s a bootstrap. It does use a number of Node packages developed by Dave Winer for feed generation and feed reading, and uses Andrew Shell’s rssCloud server for notification, so I think it falls into the “working together” category that Dave Winer wrote about in 2015: “When you have a choice, instead of re-inventing someone else’s work, use it.”

I am ready to work for interop with whatever Dave develops. I don’t have any illusion that MyStatusTool is the epiphany of feed-based social media tools, but I developed it to see if one could be developed, and it spawned another implementation, so I think that is pretty cool. Let’s get busy and see what happens!

Was able to get the text of a previous post into the MyStatusTool editor window, but had tags appear in the post. Did some experimenting, then I could not decode the HTML entities – frustrating!

Dave Winer is musing about a lightweight social network. As Colin Walker and I have mentioned, I think that MyStatusTool would be a great fit (rssCloud for notification, can be used for small groups)! Dave has blocked me in most forums – can someone tell him about it?

Made a change to MyStatusTool to read the user posts in the Admin interface instead of the full set of user and subscribe posts. Next will be to use the edit button to copy the individual post text to the editor window….

Followup on artcasting test – I did not see anything appear on the admin page of my MyStatusTool install. Checked to see that I could read one of the BlueSky art feeds using reallySimple, that worked. Looked at the myItems.json file from my server, did not see any items there, so I am wondering if the rssCloud part of the BlueSky art feeds is working. Will continue to investigate…

Using MyStatusTool to capture open browser tabs

Yesterday, I was able to use MyStatusTool, my minimal blogging tool, to capture URLs from a set of open tabs on my phone. I structured the posts with the website link, then the title of the post. I was able to post to my instance, all from my phone. The hardest part was selecting the text for the link. I use the Brave web browser, and another menu would pop up before the editor toolbar, so I had to tap several times to get to the link button. I think I will keep trying this as a way to capture links for later use/classification.

MyStatusTool Update – 7/14/2023

I recently added a feature to use the medium-editor toolbar when creating new posts, and wrote a post about how I integrated that into MyStatusTool. I added it to my site, and will be rolling it out to my beta users this weekend. I also did a little manual tweaking to remove some posts for one of the beta users that had some errors. Based on feedback from the beta users, I have created a number of feature request issues on my Github repo.

If anyone is interested in trying MyStatusTool, reach out to me via my About page and let me know, I will set up a test instance for you!