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Add turning-one-hundred-tweets-into-a-blog-post post
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title = "Turning One Hundred Tweets Into a Blog Post"
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date = 2020-11-03T11:40:00+11:00
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[extra]
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#updated = 2020-06-19T09:30:00+10:00
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+++
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Near the conclusion of my [#100binaries] Twitter series I started working on
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[the blog post that contained all the tweets](@/posts/2020/100-rust-binaries/index.md).
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It ended up posing a number of interesting challenges and design decisions, as
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well as a couple of Rust binaries. Whilst I don't think the process was
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necessary optimal I thought I'd share the process to show my approach to
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solving the problem. Perhaps the tools used and approach taken is
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interesting to others.
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<!-- more -->
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My initial plan was to use Twitter embeds. Given a tweet URL it's relatively
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easy to turn it into some HTML markup. By including Twitter's embed JavaScript
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on the page the markup turns into rich Twitter embed. However there were a few
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things I didn't like about this option:
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* The page was going to end up massive, even split across a couple of pages
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because the Twitter JS was loading all the images for each tweet up front.
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* I didn't like relying on JavaScript for the page to render media.
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* I didn't really want to include Twitter's JavaScript (it's likely it would be
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blocked by visitors with an ad blocker anyway).
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So I decided I'd render the content myself. I also decided that I'd host the
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original screenshots and videos instead of saving them from the tweets. This
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was relatively time consuming as they were across a couple of computers and
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not named well but I found them all in the end.
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To ensure the page wasn't enormous I used the [`loading="lazy"`][lazy-loading]
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attribute on images. This is a relatively new attribute that tells the browser
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to delay loading of images until they're within some threshold of the
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view port. It currently works in Firefox and Chrome.
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I used `preload="none"` on videos to ensure video data was only loaded if the
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visitor attempted to play it.
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To prevent the blog post from being too long/heavy I split it across two pages.
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### Collecting All the Tweet URLs
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With the plan in mind the first step was getting the full list of tweets. For
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better or worse I decided to avoid using any of Twitter's APIs that require
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authentication. Instead I turned to [nitter] (an alternative Twitter
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front-end) for its simple markup and JS free rendering.
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For each page of [search results for '#100binaries from:@wezm'][search] I ran
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the following in the JS Console in Firefox:
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```javascript
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tweets = []
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document.querySelectorAll('.tweet-date a').forEach(a => tweets.push(a.href))
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copy(tweets.join("\n"))
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```
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and pasted the result into [tweets.txt] in Neovim.
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When all pages had be processed I turned the nitter.net URLs in to twitter.com URLs:
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`:%s/nitter\.net/twitter.com/`.
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This tells Neovim: for every line (`%`) substitute (`s`) `nitter.net` with `twitter.com`.
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### Turning Tweet URLs Into Tweet Content
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Now I needed to turn the tweet URLs into tweet content. In hindsight it may
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have been better to use [Twitter's GET statuses/show/:id][get-status] API to do
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this (possibly via [twurl]) but that is not what I did. Onwards!
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I used the unauthenticated [oEmbed API][oembed] to get some markup for each
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tweet. `xargs` was used to take a line from `tweets.txt` and make the API
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(HTTP) request with `curl`]
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```
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xargs -I '{url}' -a tweets.txt -n 1 curl https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/oembed.json\?omit_script\=true\&dnt\=true\&lang\=en\&url\=\{url\} > tweets.json
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```
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This tells `xargs` to replace occurrences of `{url}` in the command with a line
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(`-n 1`) read from `tweets.txt` (`-a tweets.txt`).
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The result of one of these API requests is JSON like this (formatted with
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[`jq`][jq] for readability):
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```json
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{
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"url": "https://twitter.com/wezm/status/1322855912076386304",
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"author_name": "Wesley Moore",
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"author_url": "https://twitter.com/wezm",
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"html": "<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-lang=\"en\" data-dnt=\"true\"><p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">Day 100 of <a href=\"https://twitter.com/hashtag/100binaries?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">#100binaries</a><br><br>Today I'm featuring the Rust compiler — the binary that made the previous 99 fast, efficient, user-friendly, easy-to-build, and reliable binaries possible.<br><br>Thanks to all the people that have worked on it past, present, and future. <a href=\"https://t.co/aBEdLE87eq\">https://t.co/aBEdLE87eq</a> <a href=\"https://t.co/jzyJtIMGn1\">pic.twitter.com/jzyJtIMGn1</a></p>— Wesley Moore (@wezm) <a href=\"https://twitter.com/wezm/status/1322855912076386304?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">November 1, 2020</a></blockquote>\n",
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"width": 550,
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"height": null,
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"type": "rich",
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"cache_age": "3153600000",
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"provider_name": "Twitter",
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"provider_url": "https://twitter.com",
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"version": "1.0"
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}
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```
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The output from `xargs` is lots of these JSON objects all concatenated
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together. I needed to turn [tweets.json] into an array of objects to make it
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valid JSON. I opened up the file in Neovim and:
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* Added commas between the JSON objects: `%s/}{/},\r{/g`.
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* This is, substitute `}{` with `},{` and a newline (`\r`), multiple times (`/g`).
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* Added `[` and `]` to start and end of the file.
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I then reversed the order of the objects and formatted the document with `jq` (from within Neovim): `%!jq '.|reverse' -`.
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This filters the whole file though a command (`%!`). The command is `jq` and it
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filters the entire document `.`, read from stdin (`-`), through the `reverse`
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filter to reverse the order of the array. `jq` automatically pretty prints.
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It would have been better to have reversed `tweets.txt` but I didn't
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realise they were in reverse chronological ordering until this point and
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doing it this way avoided making another 100 HTTP requests.
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### Rendering tweets.json
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I created a custom [Zola shortcode][shortcode], [tweet_list] that reads
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`tweets.json` and renders each item in an ordered list. It evolved over time as
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I kept adding more information to the JSON file. It allowed me to see how
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the blog post looked as I implemented the following improvements.
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### Expanding t.co Links
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{% aside(title="You used Rust for this!?", float="right") %}
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This is the sort of thing that would be well suited to a scripting language
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too. These days I tend to reach for Rust, even for little tasks like this.
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It's what I'm most familiar with nowadays and I can mostly write a "script"
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like this off the cuff with little need to refer to API docs.
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{% end %}
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The markup Twitter returns is full of `t.co` redirect links. I wanted to avoid
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sending my visitors through the Twitter redirect so I needed to expand these
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links to their target. I whipped up a little Rust program to do this:
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[expand-t-co]. It finds all `t.co` links with a regex
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(`https://t\.co/[a-zA-Z0-9]+`) and replaces each occurrence with the target
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of the link.
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The target URL is determined by making making a HTTP HEAD request for the
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`t.co` URL and noting the value of the `Location` header. The tool
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caches the result in a `HashMap` to avoid repeating a request for
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the same `t.co` URL if it's encountered again.
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I used the [ureq] crate to make the HTTP requests. Arguably it would have been
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better to use an async client so that more requests were made in parallel but
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that was added complexity I didn't want to deal with for a mostly one-off
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program.
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### Adding the Media
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At this point I did a lot of manual work to find all the screenshots and videos
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that I shared in the tweets and [added them to my blog][media-files]. I also
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renamed them after the tool they depicted. As part of this process I noted the
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source of media files that I didn't create in a `"media_source"` key in
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`tweets.json` so that I could attribute them. I also added a `"media"` key with
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the name of the media file for each binary.
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Some of the externally sourced images were animated GIFs, which lack
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playback controls and are very inefficient file size wise. Whenever I encountered an
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animated GIF I converted it to an MP4 with `ffmpeg`, resulting in large space savings:
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```
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ffmpeg -i ~/Downloads/so.gif -movflags faststart -pix_fmt yuv420p -vf "scale=trunc(iw/2)*2:trunc(ih/2)*2" so.mp4
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```
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This converts `so.gif` to `so.mp4` and ensures the dimensions are a divisible
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by 2, which is apparently a requirement of H.264 streams encapsulated in MP4. I
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worked out how to do this from: <https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/294892/5444>
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I also wanted to know the media dimensions for each file so that I could have them
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scaled properly on the page — most images are HiDPI and need to be presented at
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half their pixel width to appear the right size.
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For this I used `ffprobe`, which is part of `ffmpeg`. I originally planned to
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use another tool to handle images (as opposed to videos) but it turns out
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`ffprobe` handles them too.
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Since I wanted to update the values of JSON objects in `tweets.json` I opted to
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parse the JSON this time. Again I whipped up a little Rust "script":
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[add-media-dimensions]. It parses `tweets.json` and for each object in the
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array runs `ffprobe` on the media file, like this:
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```
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ffprobe -v quiet -print_format json -show_format -show_streams file.mp4
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```
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I learned how to do this from: <https://stackoverflow.com/a/11236144/38820>
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With this invocation `ffprobe` produces JSON so `add-media-dimensions` also
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parses that and adds the width and height values to `tweets.json`. At the end
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the updated JSON document is printed to stdout. This turned out to be a handy
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sanity check as it detected a couple of copy/paste errors and typos in the
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manually added `"media"` values.
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### Cleaning Up pic.twitter.com Links
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The oEmbed markup that Twitter returns includes links for each piece of media. Now that
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I'm handling that myself these can be deleted. Neovim is used for this:
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```
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:%s/ <a href=\\"https:\/\/twitter\.com[^"]\+\(photo\|video\)[^"]\+">pic.twitter.com[^<]\+<\/a>//
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```
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For each line of the file (`%`) substitute (`s`) matches with nothing. And that
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took care of them. Yes I'm matching HTML with a regex, no you shouldn't do this
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for something that's part of a program. For one-off text editing it's fine
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though, especially since you can eyeball the differences with `git diff`, or in
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my case `tig status`.
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### Adding a HiDPI Flag
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I initially tried using a heuristic in `tweet_list` to determine if a media
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file was HiDPI or not but there were a few exceptions to the rule. I decided to
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add a `"hidpi"` value to the JSON to indicate if it was HiDPI media or not. A
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bit of trial and error with [jq] led to this:
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```
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jq 'map(. + if .width > 776 then {hidpi: true} else {hidpi:false} end)' tweets.json > tweets-hidpi.json
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```
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If the image is greater then 776 pixels wide then set the `hidpi` property to
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`true`, otherwise `false`. 776 was picked via visual inspection of the rendered
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page. Once satisfied with the result I examined the rendered result and flipped
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the `hidpi` value on some items where the heuristic was wrong.
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### Adding alt Text
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[Di], ever my good conscience when it comes to such things enquired at one
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point if I'd added `alt` text to the images. I was on the fence since the
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images were mostly there to show what the tools looked like — I didn't think
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they were really essential content — but she made a good argument for including
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some `alt` text even if it was fairly simplistic.
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I turned to `jq` again to add a basic `"media_description"` to the JSON,
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which `tweet_list` would include as `alt` text:
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```
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jq 'map(. + {media_description: ("Screenshot of " + (.media // "????" | sub(".(png|gif|mp4|jpg)$"; "")) + " running in a terminal.")})' tweets.json > tweets-alt.json
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```
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For each object in the JSON array it adds a `media_description` key with a
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value derived from the `media` key (the file name with the extension removed).
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If the object doesn't have a `media` value then it is defaulted to "????"
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(`.media // "????"`).
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After these initial descriptions were added I went though the rendered page and
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updated the text of items where the description was incorrect or inadequate.
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### Video Poster Images
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As it stood all the videos were just white boxes with playback controls since I
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has used `preload="none"` to limit the data usage of the page. I decided to pay
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the cost of the larger page weight and add poster images to each of the videos.
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I used `ffmpeg` to extract the first frame of each video as a PNG:
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```
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for m in *.mp4; do ffmpeg -i $m -vf "select=1" -vframes 1 $m.png; done
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```
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I learned how to do this from: <https://superuser.com/a/1010108>
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I then converted the PNGs to JPEGs for smaller files. I could have generated
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JPEGs directly from `ffmpeg` but I didn't know how to control the quality — I
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wanted a relatively low quality for smaller files.
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```
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for f in *.mp4.png; do convert "$f" -quality 60 $f.jpg ; done
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```
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This produced files named `filename.mp4.png.jpg`. I'm yet to memorise how to
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manipulate file extensions in `zsh`, despite having [been told how to do
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it][zsh-ext], so I did a follow up step to rename them:
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```
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for f in *.mp4; do mv $f.png.jpg $f.jpg ; done
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```
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### Wrapping Up
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Lastly I ran [`pngcrush`][pngcrush] on all of the PNGs. It reliably reduces the file size
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in a lossless manner:
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```
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for f in *.png; do pngcrush -reduce -ow $f; done
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```
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With that I did some styling tweaks, added a little commentary and published
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[the page](@/posts/2020/100-rust-binaries/index.md).
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If you made it this far, thanks for sticking with it to the end. I'm not sure
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how interesting or useful this post is but if you liked it let me know and I
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might do more like it in the future.
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[#100binaries]: https://twitter.com/search?q=%23100binaries%20from%3A%40wezm&src=typed_query&f=live
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[nitter]: https://nitter.net/about
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[search]: https://nitter.net/search?f=tweets&q=%23100binaries+from%3A%40wezm
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[tweets.txt]: https://github.com/wezm/wezm.net/blob/master/v2/content/posts/2020/100-rust-binaries/tweets.txt
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[tweets.json]: https://github.com/wezm/wezm.net/blob/master/v2/content/posts/2020/100-rust-binaries/tweets.json
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[get-status]: https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-api/v1/tweets/post-and-engage/api-reference/get-statuses-show-id
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[twurl]: https://github.com/twitter/twurl
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[oembed]: https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-api/v1/tweets/post-and-engage/api-reference/get-statuses-oembed
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[jq]: https://stedolan.github.io/jq/
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[expand-t-co]: https://github.com/wezm/expand-t-co
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[media-files]: https://github.com/wezm/wezm.net/tree/master/v2/content/posts/2020/100-rust-binaries
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[add-media-dimensions]: https://github.com/wezm/add-media-dimensions
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[shortcode]: https://www.getzola.org/documentation/content/shortcodes/
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[tweet_list]: https://github.com/wezm/wezm.net/blob/master/v2/templates/shortcodes/tweet_list.html
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[Di]: https://didoesdigital.com/
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[zsh-ext]: https://twitter.com/Sasha_Boyd/status/1300666988608454656
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[ureq]: https://github.com/algesten/ureq
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[lazy-loading]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/img#attr-loading
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[pngcrush]: https://pmt.sourceforge.io/pngcrush/index.html
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@ -31,7 +31,7 @@ body.home {
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pre, code {
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font-family: "Pragmata Pro", "Pragmata Pro Mono", "JetBrains Mono", "Iosevka", "Consolas", monospace;
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}
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code {
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:not(pre) > code {
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background-color: #ffedf0;
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padding: 0.1em 0.2em;
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font-size: 16px;
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