This repository provides a most simple web app that helps to bulk follow sociologists on the FOSS microblogging service Mastodon. In it you can create a csv-file that can be uploaded in any accounts mastodon settings, in order to follow a list of accounts at once.
Yes, basically you just have to fork the repo and make some minor changes. But we want to make you aware that this is by no means a professional project. Things may fall apart. It’s not very complex, and if you store your CSV file safely, nothing bad should happen. But our main focus is to make this work for the Sociologists on Mastodon page, not to offer generic tool. We still try make things easy for you, if you want to set something similar up.
Please make sure to only add account information into your CSV file and webpage with the consent of the owner of the account! Even though we are keeping minimal stored information, make sure everybody has agreed to be on your list. Keep in mind that if you delete a name from the file it will still be in the repository's history, so the best security is ensuring accounts with owners that do not consent never get added to a list. Scraping publicly accessible information for accounts to add to the CSV file and webpage does not gather consent.
There are two files that you will need to change. The Text in index.html and the accounts that are stored in resources/users.csv. Please keep the name of this file (or change it in assets/js/app.js, too).
For your convenience, we also have included a cleaned template for your index.html. It is named adapt-index.html. In it, all places where you ought to fill in some specific text for your purpose start with XXX, in order to make them easily identifiable. Fill in the Text, rename the file to index.html. You can now discard of the original index.html. You do not need to write any html formatting, however, if you want to make multiple paragraphs, two tags could come in handy: the (<p></p> tag)[https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/p] and the (<a href=""></a> tag)[https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/a]. That’s it.
You can publish your web app directly from the repository. For this, go to “Settings” and then choose “pages” in the left menu.
If you have created a “XY on Mastodon” page on any academic or scientific topic, please add it to the Academics on Mastodon list of lists here or just contact us. If it’s on any other topic, let us know, too, so we can share it.
If you want to get in touch with other people maintaining an “Academics on Mastodon”-List, you can follow the group AoM_lists@a.gup.pe or enter the public Matrix space #AcademicsOnMastodon:riotchat.de.
The CSV file containing the account information is stored in /resources/.
Any file with the columns account,name,url will do. You have the option to add a column names keywords, which allows the user to filter the list by the topics mentioned in it. In a next step I also want to add the possibility to filter by languages, so it might be helpful to already include a column named language. However, the webpage should work perfectly fine without those extra information.
If you use keywords they should be separated by a space (" "). “Multiword keywords” should be connected by an underscores ("_") – for instance: this_is_a_keyword this_is_a_second_keyword. Languages are separated by a space (" "). Make sure that you don’t use any commas here, as that would break the CSV file’s structure. If you have columns named keywords or language and you use them in a different way, you may have to adapt the app.js file.
In order to avoid malformed CSV files there is a test that checks that every row has the same amount of cells as the header. So make sure to keep your CSV file consistent, if you add columns in the header. (Opening it with LibreOffice and saving it as CSV can be a convenient way to add any missing commas or spot other problems.)
The page tootformat.html renders all accounts from the CSV file as “account (name)”. This offers you a more readable format, which you can copy to your posts in Mastodon. It can be reached if you add /tootformat.html to your webpage’s url.
This is still experimental. Will add a page that let’s users generate their own entry and send it via email to make adding new users simpler and more reliable. It will also include a simple way of verifying that the person adding the account is it’s owner. I am working on it here: https://github.com/trutzig89182/AoM-add-user and want to include it later.
Metatags help you to change how the webpage is previewed in social media. You can find them in the <head> of index.html. Adapt them to your pages name etc.
If you want to use a preview picture, put it in resources/images/ and name it preview-image.png.
In the folder create-preview-image/ you find the file preview-image.sla. It is a template for your XY on Mastodon preview image. Please load the Mastodon Mascot (Greeting).png image from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mastodon_Mascot_(Greeting).png and save it in the same folder. Now you can open preview-image.sla with the FOSS layout program Scribus. You probably will have to relink the images within the file to the PNG you downloaded. Perhaps you will also have to choose another font for the text.
Once you have done that, you can simply change the Title. I suggest you also change the background collour to make the preview images more distinguishable. Export your image as PNG. Make sure your file ist named preview-image.png and store it in /resources/images/. In one last step you have to adapt the links to your file in the Metatag section in index.html.
@eyssette has created a nice little bookmark script to get relevant information for adding an account in one click. You can find it here: https://gist.github.com/eyssette/a3c0df2a52b43ca1e2c78299b97c6306
Also, I have made a basic form, that will create an email with a preformatted string for a new account entry for the CSV file. It’s work in progress, but you can find it here: https://github.com/trutzig89182/AoM-add-user
The repository can be used under GNU General Public License v3, except the file /resources/users.csv, which can only be used with explicit permission by the authors.