Did some work on MyStatusTool today, having trouble figuring out how to pass a string into the medium-editor, seems like I may have to clean up the text first…

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….

Did a little work on MyStatusTool today, adding code to add edit buttons to user posts. Slow progress, but still progress.

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…

Decided to try reading artcasting feeds in MyStatusTool (following Colin Walker and Dave Winer’s lead). I noticed, however, in the artcasting test feed that there is no cloud element, which MyStatusTool relies on for updates. Looked at Dave Winer’s river of art feeds, saw they had the cloud element, and added them into my feed list. Will check periodically to see if I see anything…

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!

Creating software that is easy to use is hard to do…I am re-learning this as I work on MyStatusTool…

Dave Winer talks about bootstrapping a federated 140-character loosely coupled network. I think MyStatusTool fits the bill! You don’t have to get an account on Threads or wait for a Bluesky invite – just download, install, and get started making some news of your own! PS – I already wrote about this bootstrap.

Notes on adding a feature to MyStatusTool

Looking at adding medium-editor to MyStatusTool, downloaded zip file from medium-editor repo.

Made a copy of my current setup

Updated config.json and app.js to use port 2030

Looked at this demo of use of textarea with medium-editor, will work on adding this to admin.js

Updated views\admin.js to add references to medium-editor CSS and JS files, and add other stuff to support.

Added medium-editor CSS and JS files to public\css and public\js folders

Was able to get the medium-editor working, but could not see the labels on the toolbar. After a fair amount of searching, found a set of options for button labels that made me go back to the demo page I was using for an example. Instead of “false” (the default value), the button labels option was “fontawesome”. I had issues with some other app in trying to correctly access FontAwesome fonts, so I decided to change that to “none”, and then I was able to see the labels – awesome!

I then was able to add links in some text, and that worked correctly in the displayed text and the RSS feed. I did notice that there were paragraph marks in the RSS feed description. I had seen some mention of medium-editor adding paragraph tags, so I added some logic to app.js to strip the tags before creating the feed (I was already doing this for the post itself).

I then tried all of the buttons on the toolbar, and they had the desired effect – nice!

During this effort, I briefly looked at some other options (TinyMCE, Quill), but found there were restrictions or payment requirements, so I am glad I was able to get the medium-editor working. I will be adding these changes to the repo and doing a little more testing before rolling out to my beta testers (let me know if you would like to be a beta tester for MyStatusTool!)…