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Ghostwriter Markdown Editor as Twitter Character Counter

I recently began using the Mastodon Twitter Crossposter tool to syndicate my Mastodon posts from linuxrocks.online to Twitter. My Twitter account - which exists solely for promoting The New Leaf Journal, had been left dormant for more than a year (because Twitter is terrible). But since I keep the account for SEO purposes anyway and I already use Mastodon, I figured it was worth seeing if I could revive it without actually touching Twitter.

One issue with syndicating from Mastodon to Twitter is that Mastodon allows for longer posts than Twitter does. If a Mastodon post goes over Twitter's character limit, the cross-poster truncates it on Twitter and includes a link to the full post on Mastodon. While that is fine in some cases, that is not what I want if I am linking to a New Leaf Journal article. For posts where I link to an article, I want the article thumbnail to show up on Twitter instead of a link to my post on Mastodon.

When I first started creating Twitter-length Mastodon posts, I lazily used an online Twitter character counter to keep my posts within Twitter's character limit. The value of my laziness was undercut by having to allow specific scripts on the character counter since I set uBlock Origin to block all scripts by default.

After a few posts, it occurred to me that I was being dumb. I use the Ghostwriter markdown editor as my go-to writing tool. I not only use Ghostwriter for my creative writing work at The New Leaf Journal, but also for my law writing work at my day-job. By default, I have Ghostwriter set to show how many words are in my document. However, it can be set to show characters instead. With that one small adjustment, my favorite writing tool serves as a perfect Mastodon post composer for keeping content within Twitter's 280 character limit.

See below for links to various topics that I discussed in thus article. For Gemini and Gopher users, all of the links are https.

Mastodon Twitter Crossposter tool

My micropost on using the Mastodon Linux Crossposter

Homepage for the Ghostwriter markdown editor

My comprehensive review of Ghostwriter

My micropost on using Ghostwriter as a Mastodon/Twitter post composer

Also see my related post here on smol.pub about my current Mastodon instance.

Moving from Mastodon Social to Linux Rocks - HTTPS

Moving from Mastodon Social to Linux Rocks - Gemini

Moving from Mastodon Social to Linux Rocks - Gopher

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