Jan’s Blog

Mastodon is where I first learned about “blurhashes,” the blurry image placeholders that show while images are still loading. After I’d recently added support for image attachments to this site’s ActivityPub implementation, I learned that Mastodon instances don’t necessarily generate blurhashes for images sent from other servers.

My last post on the subject isn’t even old, but this blog is now powered by a custom, Laravel-based “CMS.” Much less simple for the average person—though not entirely impossible—to […]

Really, it’s just WordPress + IndieBlocks with most settings enabled.

Version 0.19.1—one day I’ll be ready, psychologically, for a 1.0 release—addresses 3 bugs. One had to do with image uploads failing on certain PHP installs. The other two changes should bring the block editor in line with the classic editor. That is: That toggle seemingly having a mind of its own was particularly weird. I’m […]

I made my blogroll look a tiny bit nicer. I’m planning to still add actual RSS or Atom links, and remove any duplicate entries. (They’re there because I occasionally follow multiple versions of the same feed, for troubleshooting purposes, or multiple feeds from a single site.) Ages ago, I created a WordPress plugin called Sync […]

I’ve used this trick a few times lately, when I wanted to partially disable certain WordPress plugins’ behavior. WordPress comes with all these hooks, right, and plugins do little more than attach callback functions to them. To insert extra bits of, well, anything, or modify variables before they’re used elsewhere. So, if you ever want […]

One thing that’s been bothering me (a little), is the Excerpt blocks here on this blog. When no manual excerpt is set, the block calls wp_trim_words() to generate one dynamically, and append a horizontal ellipsis (“…”). It tacks this right onto the excerpt, even if the ends in a period or comma, which looks off. […]

I’ve been using WordPress’ “new” block editor for quite a while now, have moved my site over to a block theme, and so on, but I also almost always have a couple “old-style” meta boxes open. And because of how WordPress works, this combination of Gutenberg and meta boxes results in posts being “saved” twice, […]

Just noticed this little code snippet in the WordPress’ ActivityPub plugin’s codebase.

I should probably blog about this over at the IndieBlocks website, but whatever. So, what’s new in version 0.10.0? Well, webmentions for replies. That is, the plugin is now able to also send webmentions for comments that themselves are replies to a comment that originated as a webmention. (Makes sense? Good.) Doesn’t matter whether those […]

Quick overview of most of the plugins I’m running here. I run quite a few “mu-plugins,” too, to further tweak things, but let’s keep those for some other time.

Some things to consider when enabling ActivityPub on a self-hosted WordPress install. TL;DR: If your setup allows for it, use NGINX’s FastCGI cache; if not, consider the Surge plugin. Or a beefier server. Whenever one of your posts gets “boosted,” a whole lot of other servers may try and fetch (or GET) that post’s JSON […]

I used to actually host a Mastodon server. And it was then I first started to look into S3 object storage. For those not in the know, Mastodon—unlike, e.g., your average self-hosted RSS reader—stores both statuses and media of near the whole dang Fediverse … locally. (I mean, there are various reasons to want to […]

This one contains a couple bug fixes. I also refactored some of the plugin’s inner logic. If you run into problems, hit me up.

Share on Mastodon used to rely on (only) the transition_post_status hook to kick off a request to Mastodon’s API. Then Gutenberg came.