A couple years ago I created a site called MastoGizmos, a collection of tools for exploring and searching Mastodon. One of the tools in the eleven item collection is Gift Article Gazette, an aggregator that collects articles tagged GiftArticle and GiftLink from around Mastodon and makes them available in one place.

The first version of Gift Article Gazette aggregated the gift articles directly from different Mastodon instances, which lead to problems of duplication and occasional display weirdness. Over the weekend I moved the aggregation part of GAG to a Google Sheet / Google Apps script where I can filter for duplicates and old articles. I also redid the display and added a bunch of sorting/filtering options. The URL is still https://mastogizmos.com/gag.html and it’s still free to use and free of ads.

Using Gift Article Gazette

Using Gift Article Gazette is really simple: just open the page. GAG will pull the gift article list from the Google Sheet (which updates every hour) and display them in a grid. Articles over two weeks old are considered expired and removed.

Articles can be filtered (but remember, you’re only filtering by title and description so don’t get crazy) and limited to a particular publisher. You can also sort the articles by the number of times it’s been gifted, newest first, oldest first, title, and publication.

In these times free news is important. I hope this tool gives you access to free journalism you might not have otherwise had. If you want to share free/gift links on Mastodon and see them here, hashtag them GiftLink or GiftArticle.