Automating Blog Posts to Mastodon From My Website

I have been slowly removing little bits of friction from my website. Not the fun friction. I still like writing in Markdown. I still like having the site live in a GitHub repo. I still like that this place is built with Eleventy and plain files instead of being hidden behind a dashboard somewhere. But there are a few parts of the publishing flow that have started to feel a little silly. One of them was Mastodon. For a while, my process looked like this: Write the article. Commit it to GitHub. Wait for the site to build. Open the finished article. Post it to Mastodon. Copy the Mastodon status URL. Paste that URL back into the article front matter. Commit again. Wait for the site to build again. That works. It is also exactly the kind of tiny repetitive workflow that eventually makes me sigh at my own website. So I added a way for the site to handle that loop for me. What I wanted I did not want every post to automatically go to Mastodon. Some posts are more personal. Some are drafts…