A while back I wrote on here about the various workflows I created with n8n. They're great in helping me disseminate what I'd be posting or sharing on the web anyway, but I've come to realize: there's still fat that can be trimmed. And since I've been bedridden these last few days, I decided to spend my time wisely and do just that: trim some fat.
The photolog on here, which was basically just a copy of whatever I posted on my Pixelfed instance, then pushed to this blog, turned out to be unnecessary in that sort of iteration. Barely anyone follows me on Pixelfed, and I noticed that I rarely ever use it anyway. But, I used it as a collection of images I would then repost on Mastodon (but under the same name – I know, unnecessarily complicated).
So I've decided to keep the photolog on here, but instead of posting to Pixelfed, I post directly to Ghost. But what about Mastodon? How will the general public ever be graced by my photos of food, cocktails and other miscellanea? Once again I called n8n to the rescue, because now it works like this:
I publish my images to this blog right here, and in the background the above displayed workflow checks regularly for new posts with the corresponding tag. It pulls them in, checks whether something has already been published to Mastodon, and if it hasn't, it extracts the caption, the alt-text and the url to the image, then uploads the image to Mastodon and creates a status with said image.
I'm aware that I could use webhooks instead of incessant polling, but I honestly haven't come around to making complete sense of webhooks yet. So this will have to do until the next time I'm feeling a bit under the weather.