I had a very productive Labor Day weekend. I finally got WikiTwister figured out, and last night I finished upgrading MastoGizmos ( https://mastogizmos.com/ )! MastoGizmos is a collection of 11 search tools to explore Mastodon. (You do not have to have a Mastodon account to use any of these tools.) There are tools for hashtag […]
Keep An Eye on the Fediverse With the Mastodon Hashtag Monitor
Over 15 years ago I wrote a book called Information Trapping. It was about how to set up online monitors to find online information around certain keywords and keep it coming as a flow to you via tools like RSS, page monitors, etc. As you might imagine, Information Trapping’s resources and tool listings are very […]
Mastodon Stadium Seats
Yesterday was a very big news day and I was curious to see how well Mastodon would keep me informed about breaking news as Twitter continues to crumble. I was disappointed. I run my own tiny instance populated by only about a dozen active users, so only a trickle of news was getting to my […]
A Bookmarklet for Mastodon
I made a bookmarklet today! Do you know about bookmarklets? They’re like regular browser bookmarks, only souped-up with JavaScript. As you might imagine the addition of JavaScript makes bookmarklets much more powerful than regular bookmarks. The bookmarklet I made was to address a Mastodon annoyance. Because Mastodon is decentralized, following a user on a different […]
What Do Internet Users Know About Social Signals and How Can We Apply that to Mastodon search?
It used to be that if I found some online writing I really liked, I’d look up and follow the author on Twitter. Now I look up the author and follow them on LinkedIn. This opinion piece by Elizabeth Lopatto is first rate. I love it when an entire article resonates from the jump. ‘Get […]
Light Dawns On Marblehead: You Can Use Mastodon’s Verified Identities as Search Filters
I was really pleased with the way my Mastodon tool “Gift Article Gazette” turned out. It made me eager to do more hashtag-based Mastodon search tools, but I was worried about spam. After poking into the Mastodon API, though, I think I’ve found big possibilities. I didn’t realize exactly how much information the Mastodon API delivers. […]
Daydreaming About the Perfect Mastodon Data Broadcast Setup for Emergency Responders
I used to play Rimworld a lot in the evening, but since I started learning JavaScript, it’s much more interesting to make up my own games. Yesterday evening I pretended I had just started a Mastodon instance for a county fire and rescue and I was designing a tool to make their posts as useful […]