Connecting the dynamic and server based Mastodon toots with this static Jekyll site places a few constraints on technolgies that can be used.

While I’ll use something like Mastodon for short ephemeral thoughts, my main writing is longer form and on this blog/website. But I’d still like to connect the two and the goal is to display the contents of the timeline from my Mastodon profile inside this site. A few things make this a bit tricky. The site is built with Jekyll and results in a set of unchanging static HTML files. Mastodon is dynamic with changing content.

The Embed Timeline project uses Javascript to allow a Jekyll page to fetch the latest toots from Mastodon. Perfect. Check the social media page for the result.

Took a copy of the github repository into my own private Bitbucket storage so that if I change anything I can safely store my changes. Create a local copy of the Bitbucket repository into my Jekyll repository as a submodule, which means any local edits I make can go straight back to Bitbucket.

kevin@jekyll ~/kevin.moore.name/_plugins$ git submodule add git@bitbucket.org:kmoo/mastodon-embed-timeline.git mastodon-embed-timeline
Cloning into '/home/kevin/kevin.moore.name/_plugins/mastodon-embed-timeline'...

Then edit my Jekyll files to include the Javascript, a bit of tweek to my CSS, push the changes to Bitbucket and we are done. Very pleased it was so straightforward.