Bye Bye Instagram

Instagram changed their API and made it harder to share my photos on my blog which is horseshit.

I’d have to sign up for a Facebook developer account and get some tokens and blah blah blah. I’m not doing that, so I’m removing all references to Instagram photos and just hosting the images myself.

Thankfully I didn’t link to Instagram very often. I’ll never post to Instagram again, and I rarely look at it. But when I do, I mostly look at skateboarding videos.

Here’s how I migrated off. In Hugo, Instagram photos are referenced using a shortcode like this:

{{< instagram BoFYpYGg-aK >}}

This shortcode broke because of this change, which completely broke Hugo site generation. This was irritating, but I guess it makes sense when your website is static. To get things building again, I replaced the shortcode with this:

<p><b>There used to be an embedded Instagram image here, but they deprecated the easy to use public API. I'm working on having this site not touch Instagram.</b></p>

I then had to go through my blog, find all the references to the Instagram shortcode, and use those to build URLs to the actual images:

$ rg "<\s*insta" | grep -o " instagram [^\s]* " | awk '{print "https://instagram.com/p/"$2}'
https://instagram.com/p/BoFYpYGg-aK
https://instagram.com/p/BoFX6j8APC2
https://instagram.com/p/BoG9IvzgtAB
https://instagram.com/p/BoIrdP9gSee
https://instagram.com/p/BoSk4xTgATQ
https://instagram.com/p/BoS_gw3gozI

These are the images that I need to replace. You can’t just open those pages, right click on the image and hit “save” because Instagram doesn’t want to act like a normal website. You can use a web inspector to find the resource and save it, which is what I ended up doing. Thanks again Instagram.