WP ActivityPub plugin

I’m shutting down the post -> WP Plugin -> Mastodon as @blog -> replies-as-comments workflow.

I wrote about this a while back and thought it might be a great idea. The short version: WordPress posts share automatically to Mastodon, and replies on Mastodon show up as comments on my blog. I’d been running it as an experiment and was hopeful. Turns out it’s not ready for prime time, so I’m shutting it down and moving back to posting links from assortednerdery@mastodon.social instead.

The first part worked well. Posts go out automatically under @blog@danielandrews.com. The rest? Kind of a shit show.

A couple things I’d love to see improve:

  • It posts from its own Mastodon account, not your personal one. Minor, but it bothers me.
  • It was, broadly speaking, pretty unreliable. Posts would publish and then disappear after some time. No idea why. If it annoyed me, I’m sure it annoyed anyone following along.
  • The default template is super opinionated, so you basically have to build an override to nuke the entire thing or it won’t bring along custom fields or anything else.
  • No spam control. When I did a batch import of old posts recently, the account blasted out a wave of “edited” notifications to anyone following it. I took every precaution I knew of to suppress the RSS feed updates. Didn’t matter. Sorry to anyone who follows @blog@danielandrews.com and watched their timeline get buried.

The thing I keep coming back to, though, is something the tooling doesn’t really support yet: I want my short Mastodon posts to interweave with my longer writing on the site, as their own post type. A kind of unified stream.

I think I might just be describing micro.blog.

Rebuilding the blogging muscle

It’s been a long time since I wrote anywhere other than in my Day One journal (which I do nearly daily at this point – I love the type of things I notice and jot down when it’s mostly for an audience of one). I’ve mostly avoided social media over the past year or two […]

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Mod_security, Mint, and Dreamhost

Mint and mod_security April 15th, 2008 Recently I came across a problem in Mint that I thought I’d share a solution to. Over the past month or so, I had noticed a huge drop off in traffic on my site. At first I figured this was due to the fact that I wasn’t writing anything […]

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WordPress 2.5

WordPress 2.5 has been released, and so far I am quite impressed. What’s new, you ask WordPress 2.5, the culmination of six months of work by the WordPress community, people just like you. The improvements in 2.5 are numerous, and almost entirely a result of your feedback: multi-file uploading, one-click plugin upgrades, built-in galleries, customizable […]

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Refresh 2

February 3rd, 2008 I’d like to welcome everyone to the new version (version 5 by my count) of my site (1 1.5 2 3 3.5 4). There will be some kinks as always (notably the search feature, categories index static pages aren’t perfect yet), but I feel that it’s ready to push out the new […]

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March Notes and News

It’s time for that monthly update of what’s going on in my little ol life. Work is going well, and that’s pretty rare for me. I always seem to find something wrong with where I work or how things are being done and start looking for a way out. But so far, that’s not the case here.

I honestly think that it’s the fact that things change so much here. That can be a good thing and a bad thing, to be sure, but it seems to keep the job interesting. I do wish I could spend more time doing design work vs. upkeep of current sites, but you can’t have everything you want.

I rarely talk about my lady situation but I thought that I’d at least mention that I’ve been spending time with a young lass lately and things are going really well. She’s intelligent, funny, absolutely stunning, and (here’s the kicker) she somehow thinks I’m worth hanging out with. We’re both the busy types so it kind of works out nicely right now, as we understand each other’s time constraints and aren’t rushing anything.

So that’s all, wish me luck! Another thing you most likey don’t even notice is that I have switched content management systems. danielandrews.com/ is now running on wordpress, rather than movable type.

I found constant rebuilding to be a hassle, and was going to actually switch to textpattern months ago, but decided to go with wordpress, as I’m fairly comfortable using it already. For you, this won’t really look or feel any different, but updating pages will be a lot easier for me, and the stress on a server having to rebuild thousands of pages will be minimized as well. I’ll be moving the There are some css issues i need to hammer out (mainly the comments) so bear with me while i make the switch.

Also, I’m sure there will be broken links aplenty. Sorry in advance. If you are subscribing to my RSS feed, the new URL is [link] If anyone still comes to this page from wtmcgee.com, be advised that the domain expires soon and I may not be renewing it. Also expect a new layout in the coming month, if I can find the spare time for it.

CSS Tabs

I had been playing around with the menu here for a while now. For a while, it was a very boring, plan bar with absolutely no indication of where you were, and had no rollover states either. I wanted to solve this problem, but while using CSS formatting to achieve the look. Over the past […]

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