textcasting

An HTTP server that can post messages to Mastodon, Bluesky and WordPress via REST call.

Think of it as a bridge between web writing tools and various places people want to post their writing to.

Goal

To make linkblogging across all the twitter-like systems as easy as it can be, based on the features and limits of each platform.

It's a good time to do this because there are enough twitter-like systems out there, and people are manually doing what textcasting does in a way where the computer network does all the work. The cost is there is in all cases a fairly complex setup process. The only way to simplify it is to add a centralized service, but that isn't in the scope of this project.

Platform drivers

As of August 2024, there's now a plug-in architecture.

Instead of implementing support for each of the platforms in the textcasting.js main file, they are in a folder where you can add new platform support. There are four examples in this repo.

You don't have to restart the server to add a new platform driver.

Here's an example of a platform driver. It's a Node.js package that exports a single function named post that takes two params, an options object and a callback function.

The options object has all the params the plugin needs. Each platform is different, some require usernames and passwords, some a combination of four access tokens. The params are passed via a REST call from the client to the textcasting server.

The function calls back with usual two params, err and data, data is whatever the platform sent back to us about the posting of the item.

The plugins/platforms folder

Platforms have names like twitter, mastodon, bluesky, wordpress etc.

It's an open architecture -- to add a new platform, create a sub-folder of the plugins/publishers folder

The name of the sub-folder is the name of the platform.

The folder must contain a file named code.js which contains the source code of a Node module that uses the params to send a message to the platform.

It must export a function named post. It receives the options struct, and a callback.

It then sends the message, and reports back the result through the callback.

The module receives, in the options struct, the folder it came from, so it can save files and access them later, for storing stats, for example.

Over time there may be other required files in a platform's folder.

The REST interface

If your server is running at https://mytextcast.com/, then you can send a message via Mastodon, for example, by sending a POST request to:

https://mytextcast.com/mastodon

The body of the post contains the parameters the Mastodon platform driver requires, which are urlsite, accesstoken, title, link and description.

The params are found in options.params.

Other elements of options, provided automatically by textcasting:

• platformname -- in this case "mastodon"

• folder -- the filesystem path to the folder the driver was found in, giving the driver a place to store stats and the like.

• userAgent -- the value from config.userAgent, by default the name and version number of the textcasting app, but this can be overridden in config.json.

How to set up a server

I still have to create an installation checklist.

If I were starting a new service to do what textcasting does, I'd copy the contents of the testing folder into a local folder where you run server apps.

Look in the config object in textcasting.js, look for things you need to override, and define them in a config.json file at the same level as the textcasting.js app. Make sure the JSON syntax is correct.

If you've installed any platform drivers beyond the four that come in the download, you may have to add dependencies to the package.json file from the testing folder.

At the command line, enter npm install.

And then run the app.