pywws.service.bluesky

Post messages to Bluesky.

Bluesky is a micro-blogging system that is a whole lot better than the cesspool Twitter has become under Space Karen. This module sends “skeets”, with optional image files, typically to report on weather conditions every hour.

Create account: https://bsky.app/

Example weather.ini configuration:

[bluesky]
handle = bishopstonwthr.bsky.social
password = xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

[hourly]
text = ['skeet.txt', '24hrs.txt']
plot = ['24hrs.png.xml', 'rose_12hrs.png.xml']
services = [('bluesky', 'skeet.txt'), ('ftp', '24hrs.png', 'rose_12hrs.png')]

Create an account

You could post weather updates to your regular Bluesky but it may be cleaner to have a separate account just for weather reports.

The pywws.service.bluesky module requires you to install an additional dependency:

sudo pip install atprototools

Authorise pywws

Before you can send “skeets” you need to authorise pywws to post to your account. If you run pywws on a low power device such as a Raspberry Pi, you may find it easier to generate an app password on a browser on another computer and type the values into the weather.ini file using any text editor.

Log into your Bluesky account in a browser and navigate to Settings -> Privacy and security -> App Passwords -> Add App Password. Give it a memorable name (or use a randomly generated one) and then make a note of the password in the next section; it won’t be displayed again. This password will give access to your account, and should be kept confidential.

Create a template

A “skeet” is a short text of up to 300 characters. It’s up to you what to put in your “skeet” but an example is included to get your started. Copy the example template skeet.txt to your template directory, then edit it to suit your preferences. (Note hashtags are not automatically rendered as hash tags, and getting them to work is complicated as you have to figure out the start/end position in the post text, that’s just too hard for this currently). You should also check it uses the same text encoding as your other templates. The example template includes a media line to send a graph. Either remove this or copy the example graph template tweet.png.xml to your graph templates directory, if you don’t already have one there.

Now generate a skeet file from your template, for example:

python -m pywws.template ~/weather/data ~/weather/templates/skeet.txt skeet.txt
cat skeet.txt

Post your first skeet

Now you are ready to run pywws.service.bluesky:

python -m pywws.service.bluesky ~/weather/data skeet.txt

If this works, your new Bluesky account will have posted its first weather report. (You can delete the skeet.txt file now.)

Add Bluesky posts to your hourly tasks

Edit the [hourly] section in weather.ini. If your skeets include one or more graphs you need to add the graph templates to the plot list. Note that if you reuse your Twitter graph you only need to generate it once. Add your skeet template to the text list. Finally, add bluesky to the services list, with an option specifying the template processing result. For example:

[hourly]
text = ['skeet.txt']
plot = ['tweet.png.xml']
services = [('bluesky', 'skeet.txt')]

You could use the [logged], [12 hourly] or [daily] sections instead, but I think [hourly] is most appropriate for Bluesky updates.

Include images in your skeet

Each post contains up to four images, and each image can have its own alt text and is limited to 1,000,000 bytes in size. However, the atprototools libary used to interface with Bluesky is currently coded to just manage a single image; it also cannot accept ALT text for the image.

To include an image ensure the first line of the skeet is media path where path is the file name or full path for file that are not in your “output” directory (a subdirectory of your work directory called output). . The “skeet_media.txt” example template shows how to do this.

The image could be from a web cam, or for a weather forecast it could be an icon representing the forecast. To add a weather graph you need to make sure the graph is drawn before the tweet is sent. The pywws.regulartasks module processes graph and text templates before doing service uploads, so you can include the graph drawing in the same section. For example:

[hourly]
plot = ['skeet.png.xml']
text = ['skeet_media.txt']
services = [('bluesky', 'skeet_media.txt')]

Classes

ToService(context[, check_params])

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