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 […]
VibesMasto Gets an Overhaul and a Web Version
Saturday I dug out the VibesMasto News Monitor so I could monitor news about the protests around the country. It was very useful but it also made me cringe. I first made this tool about two years ago when I knew a lot less about JavaScript, and its code is CRUSTY. Uncrusting it became yesterday’s […]
Monitoring Protest Hashtags With VibesMasto
Can’t go to the protests today but you still want to know what’s going on? Check out this tool I made to monitor hashtags at the larger Mastodon instances and aggregate them into a browser tab that refreshes automatically. I set it up because I have a tiny instance and our news flow isn’t great. […]
MastoGizmos Gets An Overhaul
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 […]