Exocortex tools part I: social media automation with very small shell scripts

Exocortex Tools is a series describing my personal set of utility shell scripts. The term ‘Exocortex tool’ in this context comes from @VirtualAdept, but this does not represent his toolchain. This entry will be focusing on post, links.sh, and notes.sh.

There’s a lot of interest in cross-posting tools & alternatives to traditional web-based centralized social media lately. I have been using a toolchain I wrote myself for several years, and I have avoided describing it until now because the tools I wrote are so simple that I didn’t consider them worth describing. However, I’ve seen a lot of people using webtech or otherwise doing much more work than necessary, while failing to achieve feature parity with what I’ve got.

When it comes to any form of automation, the unix shell is your friend: it will allow you to compose existing tools together with a minimum of fuss, and existing tools are typically pretty well-suited to using it (or else programs like curl are well-suited to bridge that gap).

In my particular case, I have a presence on a variety of social networking sites, only a few of which have IFTTT integration, and I would like to automate the broadcast of certain types of posts. In particular, I want the ability to post arbitrary microblogs to all services simultaneously, the ability to post links with automatically-fetched titles, and to have those links show up in a pinboard-like minimal interface on my website. Furthermore…