Not that it means a hill of garbanzo beans to anyone, but I’ve pretty much stuck a fork in Twitter, the platform I will only call Twitter. I’m not deleting, I just logged out.
Still, I have a number of projects, web sites, of trace importance to most but me, that are still encrusted with Twitter features. The big looming one is the theme I made for the DS106 Daily Create where I have made small steps to have it post new Challenges to Mastodon, caltered the prompts with instructions to do so, and lately, also added a Share to Mastodon button. I still have to get deep in the old code and change out the harvesting from Twitter for replies (which the Dark Lord of Twitter killed when it took away the API).
I also managed to add share to mastodon buttons to my fleet of edtech generators — try this version of the original Ed Tech Metaphors first spawned by Martin Weller, each spin has two share buttons (I left twitter is an an option, but it can be removed if you make a copy of the code). The Mastodon sharing here uses the nifty Mastodon Share service.
For some reason I was looking at my old pechaflickr gizmo, which I have to admit is one of my favorite web things I made, still running as it was intended to since 2011. It let’s you generate a pechakucha style slide show made from randomly selected photos chosen from a tag in flickr, all making for a fun improv style activity. Minutes of entertainment.
A round of pechaflickr not only ends with a Share to Twitter button, but the front page featured an embedded twitter timeline for the #pechaflickr hashtag, which has not been updated since that functionality too was taken away by musky melon head.
That’s all gone, after a round of coding that took me way too long! I am rusty. I could not use the Mastodon Share method because the text I wanted to include included characters that eneded up encoded. I went with the approach I found for the Daily Create, a Share on Mastodon button that just runs through local HTML and Javascript (it remembers your instance using local storage, no cookies).
Plus since there are three different modes of play –regular photos from tags, then Heather mode, which displays photos but makes you guess the tag, and a fun mode that draws only from the flickr commons.
The post includes the number of photos shared and the tag, plus the link to repeat the same thrilling experience:
Now for the front page of the site I was lucky to find the Mastodon embed timeline widget, that with HTML and Javascript adds a widget to display all kinds of timelines from Mastodon, and specifically for me, one for a hashtag.
For now, I am the only one on the fediverse using the #pechaflickr tag— but you can join the party by doing a round of pechaflickr and using the magic button to share your results.
Okay, 13 years after slapping this tool together — it uses the phpFlickr php wrapper (old and not PHP 8 friendly, thats for another day) and the Vegas slideshow Javascript library for running the images on a timed sequence.
Oh, and imagine this. I did all of this stuff without a single reach for a prompt box. Pfttttttt.
Stop reading, go play pechaflickr, and share your results…. to Mastodon only.
Featured Image: Hagenbeck’s “Jenny” in North France (LOC) flickr photo by The Library of Congress shared with no copyright restriction (Flickr Commons) modified to include the pechaflickr logo on the truck and new caption added to the top.
