#project_MastodonCrossPoster

It's such a simple thing to foget, but I don't think I've ever showed anybody how my website's cross-poster actually works. So let's record a video of the actual process, warts and all.

#Webdev #Video #Tutorials #Rss #Programming #Metadata #Mastodon #HashTags #MetaData #GUI #UI #Finished #Experiments #LevelEditor #Software #GameDesign #GameDev #Design #project_MastodonCrossPoster

I finally added alt-text to my website's update-feed editor.

The point of this editor was to make it easy for me to keep people informed with minimal effort.
I added pictures to make the text look interesting enough to read. But... sometimes they also show something relevant, and encouraging people to include alt-text seems noble, so I decided to at least add the option. I do write stories sometimes. It's reasonable that a blind person might want to know about them.

#project_MastodonCrossPoster

Now it's working.

#project_MastodonCrossPoster

I could either live dangrously and not sanitize anything, or... be only slightly less reckless and make an exception for escape codes. It's probably fine.

#project_MastodonCrossPoster

Well... no. But it's probably working. My website's just sanitizing the update posts.

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Okay, now for the real test!
This post is being uploaded by my cross-posted to both Mastodon and my website. Will these look correct on both?

🎮 Game
📖 Story / Comic
📽 Video
✏️ Pencil
✍ Writing Hand
💾 Software
🎓 Tutorial
💡 Idea
❓ Question (already works)
🔗 Link
↘ Arrow (escaped)
↘ Arrow (literal)

#project_MastodonCrossPoster

Also multi-codepoint does NOT mean multi-byte. Apparently the emoji's that are immune to escape codes are the ones that combine multiple emoji's together, like: brown-family-of-four-women... with antennas.

#project_MastodonCrossPoster

Apparently the answer to my technical problem is just... look up the codes on emojipedia.
... and just pray that website never ever goes down during my lifetime.
https://emojipedia.org/

Well okay, these are standard codes so there will probably be other places to look them up. You know, like ASCii codes.

#project_MastodonCrossPoster

... except for the ones that don't.
↘
Fuck it, let's just pretend it's part of the code we see on Emojipedia and not worry about it.

#project_MastodonCrossPoster

Success!
Also, you ARE supposed to include the 1. It's just not techically part of the code, it's part of the (extremely long) escape prefix.
& # x 1
All of that is just the prefix! An overly elaborate warning to tell the browser that you're about to enter a code. And every code will needs this...

#project_MastodonCrossPoster

Apparently the 1 in that code is purely decorative. (why?!)
So the controller's code is F3AE not 1F3AE

#project_MastodonCrossPoster

... Something that doesn't work. That's what.

#project_MastodonCrossPoster

That's strange. Emojipedia says the game controller DOES have a HEX code... a 5-digit hex code?? Also, this doesn't match what the HEX editor says. Where are they getting these codes from?

Hmm... what's a "shortcode?"

#project_MastodonCrossPoster

Well that sucks. Apparently multi-codepoint emoji's don't work with escape codes.
https://www.webnots.com/how-to-insert-emoji-in-html/

#project_MastodonCrossPoster

Is it because I'm using HEX?
... No the hex code for the lion works.

#project_MastodonCrossPoster

Well that didn't work.

#project_MastodonCrossPoster

Now... how do I look up the emoji's I want?
... How do I look up the hexadecimal codes of the... oh wait... I already did.

#project_MastodonCrossPoster

It looks like this will work! Escape codes don't care about encoding. They just use basic numbers and characters within the ancient ASCii character-space, which every encoding supports.

#project_MastodonCrossPoster

Maybe there's a way to tell NodeJS to open the JSON files with a different UTF? I'd have to guess until I found one that worked.

But maybe I don't have to. I might be able to get away with using HTML escape codes instead. It would look ugly in my Flash cross-poster, but who cares? All the outputs go to websites, and all websites use HTML.

#project_MastodonCrossPoster