Mastodon Blog

I wanted to add a blog to a new website (this website already has a Mastodon account) and after a few minutes of searching for options I realised “Wait, why don't I just use Mastodon?”

Turns out it only took a handful of lines of code:

$url = "https://glasgow.social/@neil.rss";
$data = file_get_contents($filename);
$posts = new SimpleXmlElement($data);
 
echo "<ul>";
foreach($posts->channel->item as $p) {
        echo "<li><strong><a target='new' href='{$p->link}'>{$p->title}</a></strong><br />";
        echo $p->description;
        echo "</li>";
}
echo "</ul>";

Done. I can just insert that in any part of a website to show all the comments made by my mastodon account.

If I want to show only certain comments (e.g. those with a #blog hashtag) I can add some extra code inside the foreach (this is a little convulted as I wanted to ignore case)

        $allowed_post = false;
        foreach($p->category as $hash_tag) {
                if(strtolower($hash_tag) == "blog")
                        $allowed_post = true;
        }
        if(!$allowed_post)
                continue;

I'll add some caching to prevent hitting the Mastodon server's RSS file too often.

mastodon_blog.php

$url = "https://glasgow.social/@neil.rss";
$basename = basename($url);
$cache_file = "cache/$basename";
if(!file_exists($cache_file)) {
        $data = file_get_contents($url);
        file_put_contents($cache_file, $data);
} else {
        $cache_ts = filemtime($cache_file);
        if($cache_ts >= strtotime("-5 minutes")) {
                $data = file_get_contents($cache_file);
        } else {
                $data = file_get_contents($url);
                file_put_contents($cache_file, $data);
        }
}
 
$posts = new SimpleXmlElement($data);
 
echo "<ul>";
foreach($posts->channel->item as $p) {
 
        $allowed_post = false;
        foreach($p->category as $hash_tag) {
                if(strtolower($hash_tag) == "glasgow")
                        $allowed_post = true;
        }
        if(!$allowed_post)
                continue;
 
        echo "<li><strong><a target='new' href='{$p->link}'>{$p->title}</a></strong><br />";
        echo $p->description;
        echo "</li>";
}
echo "</ul>";