Post comments to Known with Micropub

Last year I wanted to backup a friend's instagram account, and chose a local Known instance as target.​

Posting "normal" text and photo posts into a blog is standardized now: Simply use Micropubwith a client of your choice. I wrote shpub in that time, which is a micropub client for the shell, neatly packaged up into a single .phar file.​

With Known and shpub in place, I wrote a script that regularly checked the Instagram account site, extracted text, image and geo coordinates of new posts and pushed them into Known.​

One thing was missing: Social reactions - comments and likes.​

So I sat down and extended Known's micropub plugin to support receiving likes, commentsand RSVPs. At the time this patch got merged, my instagram backup project was sunken into deep sleep and I never got around making the script import the reactions as well.​

Some weeks ago I wanted to write a blog post about the comments-via-micropub functionality and saw that it .. did not work at all. My patch had a serious flaw (! at the wrong place, a debug leftover) and nobody had noticed it :/ So now that problem is patched in latest git and will land in the version that follows Known 0.99.​

Usage​

Instead of sending a h=entry micropub post type, h=annotation with a couple of extra parameters has to be sent:​

Post a comment​

$ curl -X POST\
 -H 'Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded'\
 -H 'Authorization: Bearer deadbeefcafe'\
 -d 'h=annotation'\
 -d 'url=http://example.org/some-blog-post'\
 -d 'type=reply'\
 -d 'username=barryf'\
 -d 'userurl=http://example.org/~barryf'\
 -d 'userphoto=http://example.org/~barryf/avatar.jpg'\
 -d "content=There is a typo in paragraph 1 - 'Fou' should be 'Foo'"\
 'http://example.org/micropub/endpoint'

Alternatively you can use shpub:​

$ ./bin/shpub.php x annotation\
 -x url=http://example.org/some-blog-post\
 -x type=reply\
 -x username=barryf\
 -x userurl=http://example.org/~barryf\
 -x userphoto=http://example.org/~barryf/avatar.jpg\
 -x content="There is a typo in paragraph 1. 'Fou' should be 'Foo'"

Post a like​

$ curl -X POST\
 -H 'Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded'\
 -H 'Authorization: Bearer deadbeefcafe'\
 -d 'h=annotation'\
 -d 'url=http://example.org/some-blog-post'\
 -d 'type=like'\
 -d 'username=barryf'\
 -d 'userurl=http://example.org/~barryf'\
 -d 'userphoto=http://example.org/~barryf/avatar.jpg'\
 'http://example.org/micropub/endpoint'

Post a RSVP​

$ curl -X POST\ -H 'Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded'\ -H 'Authorization: Bearer deadbeefcafe'\ -d 'h=annotation'\ -d 'url=http://example.org/some-blog-post'\ -d 'type=like'\ -d 'username=barryf'\ -d 'userurl=http://example.org/~barryf'\ -d 'userphoto=http://example.org/~barryf/avatar.jpg'\ -d 'content=yes'\ 'http://example.org/micropub/endpoint'