ANDY
LUHRS

My linkblog and social media setup

I like some social media interactions on the topics that I care about, so I wanted to figure out a way to seamlessly post stuff to Bluesky and Mastodon (it seems like the people I’m interested in following are pretty split). I also love linkblogs and decided to pull together my own. I made one that works, but it’s a bit of a Rube Goldberg machine and we’ll see how well it holds up:

  1. Save links with Readwise Reader - I do all my feeds and read-it-later through Reader already, so this is something I’ve been doing for a while.
  2. Tag and notes - I tag all the links that I save with a single tag about the topic (CSS, LLMs, Cool Product, etc.) and use Readwise’s document note to put the text that I want to show up on social media and the link blog. I’m also hoping I can look at trends of tags over time to see how my interests change 😊.
  3. Readwise cron job - I have about a dozen or so various scripts scheduled to run on my server, mostly focused on owning my own data. One runs every 10 minutes to check for new Readwise saved items, dumps the entirety of new responses to a JSON file and puts the main fields into a Postgres database.
  4. Blog publishing cron job - The 2nd cron job runs every 5 minutes and updates the various parts of my blog based on changes in the database. So in the linkblog case, for each link with a public tag, it generates a markdown file with frontmatter containing the link, title, tags, etc. and the “content” of the file is my actual note. Then it runs a few git commands to commit and push if there’s changes.
  5. Astro - My blog builds with Astro and publishes through Azure Static Web Apps. I’ve bounced back-and-forth between Astro and Eleventy, and ended up just sticking with Astro.
  6. Echofeed - This is an awesome little service that polls one of my RSS feeds, and publishes to my social media for me. I made an RSS feed especially for it that lets me reformat the link style (my linkblog has “Link - Notes”, social media does the opposite).

So that all feels really sketchy, but works for me in the flows that feel naturally. I can post to a couple social media sites that I frequent without needing to do anything extra to get it shared. And it follows the POSSE model and gives me control over my data.