Login: ruari Name: Ruari Oedegaard Directory: /home/ruari Shell: /bin/plan.cat Last login Fri Aug 23 13:51:52 2024 UTC Mail forwarded to plancat@r.r0.nz. Plan: Basic Mastodon bots So I have a couple of Mastodon "bots" (automated accounts). They do not do much. They just watch for never version of various software and post if a new version appears. An example being the following which tracks a handful of desktop web browsers: ~ @browserversiontracker@vivaldi.net: https://social.vivaldi.net/@browserversiontracker I just thought I would explain how it works as it is actually fairly simple. I located various public sources for the current version number for a given piece of software. For Google I would use the Google versions json information and construct a URL like this. ~ Google Linux stable versions [json]: https://versionhistory.googleapis.com/v1/chrome/platforms/linux/channels/stable/versions Or for Firefox versions I would use this. ~ Firefox versions [json]: https://product-details.mozilla.org/1.0/firefox_versions.json Once I have good sources of reliable information for all the software I wish to track I setup a shell script that pulls them using curl. This information is then parsed with local tools. That can be a tool dedicated to the format the information is published in or at a push I could just use a regex to extract what I need with things like grep and sed. Once I have version numbers for each software I compare them with file on disk that has the version numbers I already knew about. If there are any new versions a post is created and posted with Toot TUI and I update the local file. ~ Toot - a Mastodon CLI client: https://github.com/ihabunek/toot There is a little error handling (e.g. for cases where I have trouble getting information due to stuff like network problems) but basically... that's it! At the end of the day it is the authors of the various tools I use who have done all the hard work, I just tie it all together with "duct tape" (well a tiny shell script) that is run regularly on a cron job from my work machine (since that is always on anyway). I don't know if this is helpful to anyone, or if anyone will ever read this but if it is and you do, there you go. ;) -- Mastodon: @ruari@velocipederider.com