Saturday I dug out the VibesMasto News Monitor so I could monitor news about the protests around the country. It was very useful but it also made me cringe. I first made this tool about two years ago when I knew a lot less about JavaScript, and its code is CRUSTY. Uncrusting it became yesterday’s priority. Now there’s a overhauled version on GitHub and a new version on the Web at https://mastogizmos.com/vm.html . It’s even easier to set up now. Let me give you the three-panel tour.

Panel 1

The first panel shows you the latest items from the RSS feed of your choice (you can change that and other options with the settings panel; I’ll show you that at the end.) Underneath that are trending hashtags from the Mastodon instance of your choice. Click on the “Monitor” button to add that hashtag to the hashtag monitor in the third panel.

Panel 2

The second panel shows you the trending links from the instance of your choice.

Panel 3

With this panel you can monitor the hashtags of your choice on the instance of your choice. If you monitor lots of hashtags you’ll have a pretty big list of items to scroll through, but you can set the number of visible items so it doesn’t get out of hand.

Using the Settings Panel

Speaking of settings, you might have noticed that small gear icon in the lower corner of the VibesMasto page. Clicking on that will open up the Settings panel.

The settings panel lets you change, among other things, refresh intervals for each panel, maximum number of posts to display, the Instance source for the Mastodon trending content, the RSS feed to display, and the time zone used by the clock.

VibesMasto now has a permanent tab in my browser, but I’m thinking about expanding it. Maybe a dark mode? Maybe adding a carousel of RSS feeds instead of just one? Hmm….