hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr1799.txt

Episode: 1799
Title: HPR1799: Posting From the Command Line on Open Social Networks
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1799/hpr1799.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 09:25:52

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This is HBR episode 1,799 entitled, boasting from the Command Line on Open Social Networks.
It is boasted by John Culp and is about 13 minutes long.
The summary is, I explain how to boast content from the Command Line on Open Social Networks
from.io and GNU Social.
This episode of HBR is brought to you by AnanasThost.com.
It 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HBR15, that's HBR15.
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Hey everybody, this is John Culp in Lafayette Louisiana and today I'm going to talk about
posting to Open Social Networks from the Command Line using the API.
And by Open Social Networks, I'm going to focus in particular on two of them.
One is Identica based on the pump.io framework.
And the other is GNU Social, which is the former Identica based on StatusNet.
I use both of these although I spend most of my time on StatusNet because it just appeals
to me more.
I like the threaded conversations and it seems like the conversations actually are better
over there.
But anyway, I know a lot of people use Identica and the pump.io network and I have an account
there so I'm going to talk about that one a little bit as well.
You may never have realized that you can post to your accounts from the command line but
it's possible using the API.
Now why would you want to do this?
Why would you not just go to your client on your phone or for GNU Social use HeyBuddy
on the desktop or go to the web interface or whatever?
Why would you want to post from the command line?
Well, one of the main reasons is to be able to script it and do automated postings.
For example, when I ran my own StatusNet instance, I had an account for my cat.
And my cat would periodically post messages to the timeline.
Now clearly the cat cannot log on to the web server or to the website and type out a post
nor can he do anything from the command line or whatever.
So I had to script it for him and the way I made this possible was to use the command
line API.
And I would have a script that would do something.
I think he had a couple of things.
He would update me on the weather by scraping a certain website for weather information.
I think it was just the current temperature and conditions.
And he would also occasionally do the random password of the day and he billed himself
as security kitty.
Security kitty's random password of the day and it could be any number of characters.
But he would generate a random password and then post a message to my timeline or to his
timeline to which I was subscribed.
And I said, this is the security kitty's random password of the day.
And so it's just a fun thing to do.
Some people like to create bots.
The bot is, I don't even know exactly how to describe it, but it's an automated account
that does various things depending on what kind of bot it is.
There are a few bots on the status net network and they, one of them at least, I wish I could
remember its name, but it reads your timelines and will generate random bits of text based
on everything that you've posted and then post it to you.
And so you see bits of your own text all mangled together in funny ways and it's just a fun
nerdy thing to do.
So being able to post from the command line means that you can, if you spend a lot of
time in a terminal environment, then you can post your timeline from there.
And I have a couple of scripts that I use in conjunction with Blather, the speech recognition
program where all I have to do is select a bit of text and then I will speak a command.
And then whatever text is selected is copied into my clipboard and used as the text of
a post to one of my timelines or to all of them for that matter.
And so let's just look at how you do this.
So on the GNU social platform or status net, the basic command to post a message to your
timeline, you have to use the curl command and I've put the entire command in the show
notes.
And it is curl space dash s space, double dash basic space, double dash user followed
by the username and a colon and your username password space doubles.
I'll see.
So after the username and password is another space and then double hyphen data space status
equals.
And then in quotation marks, that's where you put your message, whatever the message might
be.
And that's followed by another space and then you redirect the output to dev null by doing
double dash output space slash dev slash null space.
And that is followed by the URL for your status net instance, HTTP colon slash slash in the
example here, then it goes instance.domain.com slash api slash statuses slash update.excel.
So it's rather a long command, it's not something that you would want to be typing out every
time you did this.
So clearly it's meant for scripting.
And in the show notes, I am also going to include the script that I use to post a command
or sorry, to post a message to my timeline.
And I'm not going to read this whole thing out, but in general terms, it's a bash script
and you give it your username and password.
And I do it as variables.
And then I create a text file or like a variable that will hold the message text.
Then I have, since I'm launching this with a voice command, I give it a virtual keystroke
that does control plus C and that will copy whatever text I have selected into the clipboard.
And then I follow that up by doing the xclipspace-o to send it out of the clipboard and redirect
it to the text file that I had set up before.
Then I give it a sleep command.
I must have done that because I found that it was trying to do things too fast and choking
on something.
So I have it sleep for 0.5 seconds.
And that is followed by the entire command that I just read out to you.
And where it says double dash data space status equals, instead of putting the actual text
of the message in there, I have it do dollar sign open parenthesis cat space open quote
dollar sign text close quote close parenthesis close quote.
And so what that does is it says for the status message, what you're going to do is cat
the text file and then stick it right there and that's the message.
And after that, there's just a bit of cleanup to remove the temporary file that held the
text and it exits and then of voila, there is a message appearing on my timeline.
So that's how you do it on GNU social or status net.
On pump IO, it's a little bit more difficult to set up.
You have to install the pump IO software on your computer.
You don't have to be running a server, but you do have to have the pump IO code, which
is a node application and I'm not going to go into the specifics of how to get it and
set it up.
I'm going to link to their website so that you can go and read about it if you're interested
in this.
But once you have all of the node stuff and the pump IO software installed, then you will
have to get a, let's say you have to allow command line access to your account by getting
a command line access token kind of thing for authentication.
And then you might have to authorize the user as well and I've put examples of the commands
to run to do that in the show notes.
The pump hyphen register hyphen app and then you give it the URL for your domain or whatever
instance you're running on and tell it which port and then the title of the thing that's
trying to request access.
In this case, I use CLI for command line and then there's another command that can authorize
that username.
And once you have this all done, then you can post a message to your timeline from the
command line.
And to do that, you do the pump-post-note command, pump-post-note with hyphens in between
each word, followed by the s flag, followed by instance.domain.com, that's just a, I made
a domain, I did domain, I did.
And then the dash capital P, space 443 for the port number, space-P, space-U, followed
by your username, space-N, I guess that represents note.
And then that finally is followed by the text of your post.
In this case, I just put hello world in the show notes example.
And then I also put a script of mine, the script that I use to post to my own pump-io timeline.
And again, I launch it with a voice command, I select some text and post it to the timeline.
Now to get that text normally, I use my little dictation box, which is something that hooks
into the Google Web Speech API.
And so I can dictate a message and then put it in a text editor to do a little cleanup
because it usually gets one or two things wrong.
And once I have it the way I want it, I select the text, speak the command, and it posts
it to my timeline.
So that's how I post to both of those networks.
Now you can also do this to post to Twitter.
I'm not going to run that down too much, but I did get a heads up from someone on my
GNU Social Timeline today about the command line client for Twitter called TTY T-T-E-R-T-E-R-T-E-T-E-R.
I'm not sure how you would pronounce that, but anyway, it's a command line client for Twitter.
And so I installed that, it's a perl script.
And it seems to work very well.
There is a mode that you can call it in where it doesn't open up the client, but simply
post some message to your timeline, and that's the way I use it.
So I actually have now one command.
If there's something I want to post to all three of my social networks, I will select the
text and speak that command, and it will post it in all three places.
So anyway, it's pretty fun.
If you like to do scripting and like to do fun things like that, then you should try it
out.
It's pretty cool to be able to do these kinds of things.
I'm going to have some links in the show notes to GNU Social, to Identica, and to information
about pump I-O, and also to a limp, sorry, a limp, a list of pump I-O clients.
And then I also have a screencast that I made a couple of years ago demonstrating how I
use a bladder voice command to post a message to my timeline.
And so that's on YouTube, and I'll have a link to that as well.
Anyway, that's it.
I hope you have enjoyed hearing about how to post messages to your social media timelines
from the command line.
Bye.
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