Some IndieWeb WordPress tuning

Been spending a bit of time in the past 2 days adding some new functionality to the blog.

I am making more of an effort to write more, thanks in no small part to the 9x9x25 blog challenge I am doing with Ontario Extend. As a result, I am spending more time here & seeing a few changes I can make.

First, I turned off Gutenberg. I have used it for the past year through the beta’s and the growing pains, but honestly I am not a fan. I know, I know, it makes stuff nice and granular, but tbh, I find authoring in it a pain. It feels more complicated and seems to take me longer to actually write something in GB than the basic editor. I’ll likely be forced to move back to Gutenberg at some point in the future as it is now baked into WordPress by default. But I’ll cross that bridge when I am forced to. Right now, I just want to write.

Second, I have added in the Indieweb WordPress plugin which adds some Indieweb features to the site that will, hopefully, help me better control the flow of data from the blog (something I see Grant Potter has done on his blog). I am especially interested in seeing how this piece works:

link to syndicated versions of a post so that comments on your content in silos like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+ can come back to your original post as comments there

My hope is that it will somehow bring comments on Facebook back to the blog and display them as comments here. If I publish and article from this blog on Facebook, do the comments that people leave on Facebook display back here? It doesn’t happen quite as often as it used to in the days when I published content directly to my personal Facebook account vs my Facebook page, but still, I’d like to see if I can set up the conditions for conversations that happen on Facebook to somehow get pulled back here to the original blog post.

Speaking of Facebook, I tweaked my Facebook page there as well, switching from a service theme to a more general theme. I didn’t like that my posts were getting buried on my FB page and that a whole whack of extraneous stuff was appearing more prominently on the page. So I turned some of that off (I don’t sell anything on my FB page, so it seemed odd to have an entire section dedicated to selling stuff). Hopefully, the page makes my posts appear more front and centre on the page as that is the primary reason I have a separate FB page.

I also have created an IFTTT recipe to auto-post tweets from my EdTechFactotum Twitter account to my Facebook page. Until a short time ago, the autoposts from Twitter to Facebook were disabled by Facebook, so now with this recipe I can keep a more visible presence on FB without having to post exclusively to FB.

Finally, I have added an auto-post to Mastodon plugin to the blog. I’ve been dabbling with Mastodon for the past year or so and try to pop in every now and then. There are a few autopost to Mastodon plugins in the WordPress ecosystem. I am giving this one a go as it seems to be the most widely used.