Warning: Dull stuff about how I blog follows …
So with the impending demise of Google+ (the first major piece of which — disabling the Notification Bell — went into place this week), I have bid that platform a sad, frustrated, irked, whatcha-gonna-do farewell, and shifted wholly into my new mode of posting:
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- Write it in WordPress.
- Cross-post automagically to Twitter (with the “WP to Twitter” plugin)
- Cross-post automagically to Pluspora (with the “WP to diaspora*” plugin)
- Watch comments in all three places.
I also have the alternative of posting in Twitter; I have a Zapier routine to cross-post that into WP as a draft, whence I can clean it up a bit and post it in WP, cross-posted to Pluspora.
That basically means my readers can read me in three places (woo woo!) with minimal effort on my part, and I can keep my content (if not comments) canonical on my blog for when one of those other platforms vanishes into the ether.
(No, I’m not bitter.)
As part of that effort, I decided it was time to do some cleaning up on my blog. I’ve been running an obsolete version of Thesis as my theme for a while, and that’s cause me some technical grief now and again. And if I’m going to catch up to the current version of WordPress (5.1), I’ll need something compatible with that and that’s got all the modern bits and bobs and responsive design and all that.
I eventually decided to go with WP’s own Twenty Sixteen theme, with a few mods to the CSS to make it look closer to how I like it. It seems to be performing well, and while I have some under-the-hood things to tweak on it, and will probably continue to modify the styling, and while I’m sure there’s some early-days blog stuff that now is kind of fugly in it, it seems ready for me to use.
(If anyone spots anything that looks broken, please do let me know.)
Anyhow, that’s how I spent my Sunday afternoon. How about you?
I spent my Sunday playing Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 and doing laundry. Pretty much how I spend every Sunday. Virtual murder while cleansing my clothing for the week.
And the updated theme looks nice. I’m still rocking the original 2011 WP default theme with a mod that allows me to include the sidebar in entries. I keep debating signing up for Diaspora, but the number of nodes and such makes my head hurt.
Thanks for the theme comments. There are a couple of nice plug-ins that allow for more theme customization than comes out of the box, and I’ve found some ways to make CSS do the hard work. I’ve also decided that the additional tweaking that I could do through customizing the raw files is, ah, seriously not worth the hassle of dealing with customized files (even in a child theme). This satisfices most of my itches.
On Disaspora*, just pick a node — Pluspora works tolerably well. Your stuff will be visible to folk on other nodes looking for you or searching on the hashtags you use (thus the whole federated thing). There’s all the outliers on Friendica and Hubzilla that are sort of federated the same way, but ultimately it’s a not-bad environment to be in, and arguably more visible than just a WP blog. And the WP-to-diaspora* plugin works pretty darned well.