My Post Once, Syndicate Elsewhere (POSSE) strategy

It seems this is always a work in progress.

In an effort to simplify—that is, to make things easier on myself—I’ve established two ways to publish content online, depending on whether it’s “short form” content (small enough to fit into a Mastodon toot) or “long form” content (blog posts).

Short Form Content

If it’s small enough to fit into a toot, it starts as a toot. It’s the easiest and quickest way for me to publish content. The challenge I set for myself was that I didn’t want my Mastodon server (fabulous as it is) to be the only archive. I want to own my content, even my Mastodon content.

So I wrote a Lambda Function that polls my Mastodon feed and pulls that content into my blog. It also copies any images up to my S3 bucket. The workflow looks like this:

I can now use this workflow to author posts having unstructured text, links, and (up to four) images, and mirror those posts to my blog automatically. This is useful for

Ordinary toots
What I’m doing now (reading, watching, listening, making, etc.)
Sharing photos
Sharing links to articles, blog posts, web sites, etc.

Eventually, I intend to split these short form posts into a separate “micro” blog. But for now all short form content is mixed in with my regular “long form” blog posts.

NEW! Auto-generated Titles!

I recently added a new feature to the Lambda Function I mentioned above. Instead of trying to extract or infer a title, I’m now using Anthropic’s Claude 3 Haiku large language model (LLM) to automatically generate a title based on the content. It’s a very inexpensive and fast model to use, which is why I chose it. I’ve only used it for a few posts now, but so far the results are pretty good. I’ll keep an eye on it and if necessary I can try a more sophisticated model later.

Long Form Content

I use omg.lol’s Weblog service to write my long form blog posts. I’m working on a new approach using 11ty though.