With all the Elon Musk-inspired Twitter chaos, I’ve been thinking about a few things: What would I do if Twitter went away? What do I get from Twitter that I would really lose?
One of the first things that jumped out at me was this: Twitter inspires me to write. Why? My best guess is that it gives me a few things: constant stimulus to get my brain moving, instant feedback, low friction, low stakes.
At least some parts of that, though, I think could be replicated without Twitter itself.
So that’s what tis blog is. It’s low friction, it’s low stakes, it provides me with prompts (in the form of a random question at a random time every day). The instant feedback part isn’t there yet, and I think that’s important, but perhaps by auto-posting to social networks, I’ll get there.
How does this blog work?
Good question. I’m typing it out now, because at the moment, I remember how it works. But that won’t last much longer.
Telegram bot
First, I built a bot with the botfather, and plugged that into a service called Pipedream, which is a sort of like ifttt for developers.
Pipedream
Pipedream takes in the json from the telegram bot, uses jq to strip out just the text of the message and pass it to a variable. It clones the repo for this github pages site, and then formats the text of the message into a post. It then commits its changes back into the repo
Github pages
The blog itself is based on a template called Chirpy, which conveniently comes with a GitHub action that builds and deploys itself whenever you commit. This is a big timesaver, and the reason I didn’t have to code an extra step to deploy. It’s pretty nice.