Another Micro.blog tool from @timapple, this one is for blogging from the command line. The year of micro apps.

@manton thanks for sharing, it’s not super fancy, but for a quick blurb while working it’s handy.

@manton is there are post where the latest and greatest micro apps are posted?

@drose We used to have a help page for third-party apps, but it’s stale now. Would be good to have a place for app links, or a formal directory like plug-ins.

@manton that would be sweet! Any particular new-ish apps that stand out to you?

@timapple I was thinking about something like this a few days ago. This looks great.

@manton This is awesome. I’ve been hoping for something like this. Thanks @timapple.

@lmika @manton let me know if it works for you.

@timapple You might want to add to the instructions that you have to install Go before you can run go install! I used brew install go, but I’m on an ancient version of Mac OS, so it built it from source, which took ages. It worked, though.

However, after I ran go install I don’t have the mb command. Not sure what’s gone wrong. There were no error messages.

@devilgate you on a mac? I’m not sure if mac version would work because I didn’t plan on it, github built the package.

@devilgate sorry I re-read this, you are on Mac. those builds were more experimental. I don’t own a Mac to test on or troubleshoot. I’m sorry, it was sort of a tease. I just updated the readme to say it’s Linux only for now on.

@timapple Ah, fair enough. Thanks.

@devilgate Strange, though, that everything seemed to work, except installing the actual command.

@timapple And, digging a little deeper (I’ve never used Go before): go run mb works. I get the prompt to set up my token. So with a little judicious aliasing I should be able to make it work.

@timapple and it works beautifully!

@devilgate that is good to hear. The code should in theory always work, I just can’t support Mac. So, if there are future updates there my be some jiggering needed to get it going, but should work.

@timapple FWIW, the Darwin binaries built by GitHub work for me. These binaries are not notarized, so you need to jump through the system hoops of allowing unsigned binaries. If you wanted to go the whole nine yards, you’d need to pay for a Developer account ($99/year) to do the notarization dance.

@timapple If you do decide to go that route, ChatGPT honestly spits out pretty decent instructions on how this can be automated with GitHub actions. You could even make a Homebrew tap repo to allow Mac users the ability to install via Homebrew. Not asking, just saying it’s possible depending on your intent. Either way, thanks for making and publishing a cool tool!

@groomsy thanks for sharing, its all just hobby stuff for me, and I’m a linux/android guy, I don’t have it in me to give Apple $99 a year to tell me what to do…lol

@groomsy thanks again for the info.. it is Go, so it’s pretty easy to just compile it. I’m not sure how many Mac users would be doing MB posts from the terminal anyway.

@timapple I’m a Mac user who does a lot in the Terminal and I’m interested in posting to MB via CLI, so there is at least one. 😅 I, however, can also compile from source or jump through the hoop to trust the binary, so no worries. I just wanted to let you know the binary that GitHub built does work.

@timapple I wound up taking a slightly different path. I spend a lot of my day in Claude Code in the mac terminal and actually do my micro.blog bookshelf updates via an MCP server I wrote and deployed. That MCP server just has a series of tools that connect to the API.

@groomsy Sounds good. I may do it some day, I am naturally fairly lazy…lol Thanks for the feedback

@7robots that sounds cool. What are you connecting the MCP server to? you have a spreadsheet of books you read locally?

@timapple well, I got rid of goodreads a while back, so I now use micro.blog as my “system of record” for my books database. As such, the MCP server really just allows me to manage my books via natural language: add book X to “want to read,” move book Y from “currently reading” to “finished.” that sort of thing.

@7robots sounds handy