Building a Bluesky AI Sentiment Analysis Dashboard

As the "Great Social Network Wars" carry on (my term, not anyone else), I’m finding myself more and more enjoying Bluesky. I do more posting on Mastodon, but Bluesky reminds me a lot more of early Twitter. Threads is… ok, but has felt too corporate. I can’t even remember the last time I checked it. Earlier this week, I was poking around the Bluesky API and was incredibly happy to discover that their Search API does not require a key and supports CORS, which means a simple client-side application could make use of it. In the past I had built similar tools for Twitter, back when it had a decent API, and I thought it might be fun to build something for Bluesky, specifically,... more →
Posted in: JavaScript

Bluesky Mapping

Update: I got busy and created a second map. Social Media Locations (comment below with suggestions for a better name). This map allows you to search for real-time Bluesky mentions of locations around the world. To start a search you just need to click on a map label for a country, state, city, town or neighborhood. Once you click on a place name messages will (often very slowly) begin to Maps Mania… more →
Posted in: Interactive Maps

Automatically Posting to Bluesky on New RSS Items

Hey folks – just a quick warning. This post is kind of a mashup/update of two earlier posts. Back almost two years ago I talked about this process but used Twitter and Mastodon: "Automatically Posting to Mastodon and Twitter on New RSS Items". Earlier this year I first talked about using the Bluesky API, with a very appropriately named post: "Using the Bluesky API". As I said, this post is going to mash up bits from both, and include new things I’ve not covered before, but for those of you who have been around here for a while, some of this may be repetition. For this solution, I’m using Pipedream. I’ve blogged for years now and love it. Their free... more →
Posted in: JavaScript

How to Use Your Domain on Bluesky

Bluesky is a hot new social networking platform that functions like Twitter from Twitter’s original founder. New users are flooding into the platform as a respite from Elon Musk’s vision of Twitter and the fumbles that have happened since his takeover. Upon signing up for Bluesky, your username defaults to {yourdesiredhandle}.bsky.social, but there’s a better and more secure option. One of Bluesky’s awesome features is the ability to base your username on a hostname’s DNS record. In short, if you control a hostname’s DNS, you can essentially verify yourself. For example, my Bluesky username is davidwalsh.name. Let’s look at how you can base your username... more →
Posted in: JavaScript