I love the way Dave Winer formats his linklogging on scripting.com. Headline/comments are plain text, followed by the link with the domain as the anchor text. Like so:
Then when the link item is cross-posted to mastodon, bluesky, and other microblogging services, only the headline/comments are posted, with the link. Like so:
I know I can do this manually—edit the markdown link by hand, and forego automatically cross-posting to masto and bluesky, instead cut-and-pasting to those two services. And I suppose I could move to radio3–but I’d rather stay on micro.blog.
Can the entire process be automated using micro.blog, maybe with the addition of third-party tools?
Thanks!
I am 98% sure this is exactly how cross posting would work— the only thing you’d have to do manually is type the domain as the link test or choose to just post the URL text as a link. Links when crossposted in your post content if your post is not a long post natively posts like pasting link content would on that service.
For example, on Mastodon, on my blog.
Sure, I linked the name of the app, but you can see that Micro.blog properly posts the link as “native” content on the cross post so that it gets opengraph stuff.
Holy guacamole! I started looking into this further so I could demonstrate that you are incorrect, but it turns out that micro.blog already has a built-in link shortener. It doesn’t do what I asked, but it does something just as good. Here’s how a bare-naked link looks on my micro.blog-hosted blog:
On the timeline:
On Mastodon:
This is great! It’s a small thing, but I like to show attribution on micro.blog but not bother showing it on Mastodon and other twitter-like services. This removes a pebble from my shoe.
Thank you for including this feature, @manton!
By the way, I already knew about this, but forgot. I used micro.blog a couple of years ago for hosting, then went away for a year or two, and came back in November. I forgot some things in my absence; this was one of them.
I’m missing something here. To my knowledge m.b. does not support Open Graph previews of any kind. I posted this link: Islamic Center of Cleveland by Khürt Williams on Island in the Net - Exploring Cybersecurity, Photography, Technology, and Nature with Khürt Williams
But this is what is displayed in the timeline.
This is about ensuring the OG for the links are loaded when crossposting, which will happen if a link is in the content of a post just like if you were to paste a link in yourself for that service. It’s not about displaying OG properties in the Micro.blog timeline, which you’re correct, doesn’t use OG to show link previews of any kind.
Got it. So micro.blog supports Open Graph for posting elsewhere (e.g. Twitter, Mastodon, Threads) but doesn’t support Open Graph previews for links from elsewhere.
Correct-- Micro.blog blogs do have open graph metadata. Micro.blog applications don’t do anything with open graph metadata.
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