MyStatusTool

There are 29 posts filed in MyStatusTool (this is page 2 of 3).

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!)…

I saw Ken’s Smith’s recent post on group activities, and I agree that larger social media may not be the place for such groups to work together. I also think another recent post of Ken’s (Choose to affiliate) also echoes this thought. To me, MyStatusTool could be the tool of communication for a small work group or organization, with the added plus of owning your content/work. Since it uses rssCloud as the notification service for new posts, real-time conversations can occur there.

Dave Winer linked this morning to a 2008 post on a “decentralized Twitter”. I believe that MyStatusTool meets that definition. I also discussed this more in a February 2023 post where I link to some other Dave Winer posts on bootstrapping. MyStatusTool is definitely in the bootstrap phase, and available to anyone who wants to try it (see this post for an example)!

New version of MyStatusTool now available

Overview of MyStatusTool

MyStatusTool is a proof of concept for a microblogging tool relying on local files for data storage and rssCloud for notification. I was motivated to do this to show how rssCloud could be used to support a Twitter-like experience. With the chaos underway at Twitter, multiple microblogging services have been getting more attention (Mastodon, Micro.blog, etc.). It seemed like a good time to try something different.

Why use MyStatusTool?

There are many tools/services that people can use to publish their thoughts on the Internet. The features that MyStatusTool brings to the table are:

  • Web application
  • Can post from a web page (PC, tablet, mobile)
  • Can instantly notify people that your feed has updated (if they are using an rssCloud-enabled reader tool/service)
  • Can instantly get updates from other rssCloud-enabled feeds (like MyStatusTool feeds, WordPress.com feeds, and WordPress.org sites using the RSS Cloud plugin)
  • Hosted by the user – no dependence on a silo service (think Twitter/Facebook, even Mastodon) – you own your content
  • Individual pages with URLs for all MyStatusTool posts

In the above description, note how Twitter-like this list of features is. People like using Twitter, so I wanted to leverage the best parts of the user experience.

There has been some recent discussion about being able to have small group conversations on the web. A group of users could use MyStatusTool to support those conversations, with each of the users subscribing to the other users with whom they want to have a conversation. It can be as small or as large as you like – no limits!

How can I get started?

Check out the Github repo and give it a try if you have a Linux server online! I have an instance running here, so you can see how it looks. There is also an alternative implementation written in PHP (MST-PHP, created by Colin Walker) which can run on most web hosting services.

If you do try it, let me know how it goes for you – I am interested in improving the user experience wherever I can….

I have migrated the feed reading part of MyStatusTool to use the formatting from Colin Walker’s MST-PHP implementation – looks great! Next up will be to add posting capability…

Making progress on MyStatusTool updates, but…

This afternoon, I started migrating the feed reading parts of MyStatusTool to my new version with authentication. I was able to get the feed subscription to work, but when the app received a POST from the rssCloud server indicating that a feed had been updated, I saw a POST /feedupdated 403 message. I did some searching on POST routes when using Passport.js, I got the impression that the service doing the posting has to be authenticated. I do not know how to make this work – Lazyweb, help!

Made some progress on incorporating the MST-PHP post styling within the sample app for user authentication! This is a static feed, but helped me to understand the formatting and how to access JSON data within an Express application.

Update on MyStatusTool development

The MyStatusTool project was on hold for a period of weeks while I was developing a glossary plugin for Micro.blog (and specifically for John Philpin). That appears to be working at least for John and me, so I am resuming work on this project. In conversations with Colin Walker (developer of MST-PHP), I am planning to move to update my user interface to match Colin’s, so our tools will be more common to users. I made a start on this by getting the simple version of username/password authentication using Passport.js set up (since my initial version did not have this). I have also spent some time familiarizing myself with how MST-PHP styles its user interface. The following is my projected list of tasks:

Login feature (in progress)

Display static set of feed items on home page

Display items on login page

Read feeds, add to posts file, update display on home and login page

Create admin page to manage feeds

Add posting feature and create a feed for posts

Add static pages for each post